National Day....I was born 3 years before Independence, when Singapore was still a colony of England. Each National Day brings back different memories.

In the 60s, all I remembered was staying indoors whenever National Day rolled around, avoiding any riots and violence that was likely to erupt. The parade then almost always emphasised our young nation's military, various statutory bodies and unions.

I love Naitonal Day. It used to be an opportunity to stay away from school. Nowadays its an opportunity to reflect on the country I was born in and the opportunities given us. I just realized what a rare commodity a Singaporean is.......I mean, there are only 4 million of us in a world of 5 billion humans!

This year, National Day made me appreciate how much the government is doing to help us survive these tough times. Retraining and re-education programs and other social help programs have mushroomed when there were none a couple of years back. It also made me appreciate that I still had a job and am still profitable and that I'm keeping my team employed without the need to cut salaries.

I could feel that the mood was hopeful that the worst was behind us.

The weather was hot and muggy and the stadium stands were packed with spectators all decked out in red. Saw more than a few thousand Manchester United soccer jerseys.

With the recent bombing in Jakarta, the police and army were much tougher with safety this year....everyone and their bag went through physical searches, X ray machines and metal detectors
I scored a free ticket to the parade and as usual, worked the crowd for people pictures. Came fireworks time in the evening, I screwed up my fireworks pictures as usual.

The goodies bag was, as usual, packed with lots of freebies. I ripped it open and dug around for the book What Makes Us Singaporean and eagerly flipped through it, looking for my entry. Ah....found it....near the end. I submitted a single favorite photo of mine 'What is Snow?' and it got published! With over 100,000 copies distributed during the rehersals and the actual day, I doubt if I'll ever put out a book of my pics at a scale like this ever again.


The traffic was BAD after the parade and I crawled and stopped for almost an hour getting out of the area. I cut a lane when a rare opportunity showed itself and the traffic policeman was on my ass almost immediately. In Singapore, never ever argue with the Traffic Police. I apologised profusely and was let off with a warning.

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I want to publish a book on South East Asia by end 2004

........and I want to be able to pay out my staff 8 months in bonuses end Feb 2004.

These were the 2 main objectives the trainers squeezed out of me over the last weekend of July at a 2 day Neuro Linguistics Programming workshop that my staff and myself went through. I normally dont believe in motivational crap like this.

But this was different and could not have come at a better time as I stood at a major cross-road in my personal life recently not knowing where I want to go and what I want to do with myself. The 2 days woke me up like a slap to my face.

The workshop changed a few lives among my colleagues as well. One guy came to see me 3 days later and told me he wanted to quit, which created a mini-crisis.
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Before I went to the Stadium for the parade, my wife had registered Genna for the Singapore Swimming Club's fancy dress costume contest. She came in 2nd behind a fat 8 year old boy. Dressed as her favorite movie character Lilo from the movie Lilo and Stitch, she melted the crowd despite her 2 n a half years. Check out my 'Family' photo gallery....I've got a pic posted of my future Miss Singapore.

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My Fists Feed My Family ended late July and I took the exhibited prints home, already planning when I would be doing my next exhibition. Now the priority is to be helping out the other guys putting up the November exhibition.

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My bosses used to ridicule me whenever I went overseas on business and stayed at 2-3 star hotels in an effort to save costs. After the Jakarta bombing which just about demolished the 5 star J W Marriot hotel, I've been getting a few requests from them for recommendations at 'low profile' establishments.

I hope they catch and hang these bastards (the terrorists, I mean, not my bosses....hey wait a minute... WHAT's the difference???!!!) Fighting for a cause I can understand ..... but to kill innocent civilians to make a statement?

Mas Arwandy Widjaja took a really disgusting and disgraceful picture of the JW Marriot attack and posted it in fotografer.net I just could not believe my eyes........ with the JW Marriot in ruins as testament to the mayhem and murder committed by Muslim radicals, Arwandy captured a picture of a group of Indonesian television and movie actors/actresses getting together for a smiley, sexy group shot in front of the carnage. Talk about being insensitive and getting your priorities all screwed up!

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I peeked into a friend's personal website last night and sneaked a peek into a fellow human's life. Sorry.... no names will be divulged. I saw sadness, anger mixed with pure happiness. It made me look back at myself when I was 20 and realize what a dumb ass I was without a care in the world then.......chasing skirts, picking up smoking and experimenting with pot.

My world then seemed so peaceful and uneventful when compared to the issues and displacement my young friend is going through and trying to find a meaning to it all.

HEY Friend! If you're reading this.......hang in there!

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Gotta remember to call Poh Poh from the Association of the Visually Handicapped to fix a ride for the visually imparred with volunteer Offstoners

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Oh yeah! I'm typing all this on my new PC. I got the 21 inch CRT for free (courtesy of NYMEX in NY who mailed it over before 9/11 and their office being inside the WTC demolished then and thus with no records to recover hardware) I paid about US$1000 for a Pentium 4 (2.4) Titan motherboard, Nvidia Geforce4 Ti graphics card, 1 gig of RAM, a CD-RW drive, 80 gigs of Harddrive, and a few other bells and whistles (including a wireless keyboard/mouse combo!)

What fun it is to have a PC installed at home...... I just about threw the whole FUCKING SYSTEM out the window of my apartment the first weekend. I surfed the Web without an Anti-virus program and without a firewall. It caught bugs and viruses faster than any human caught the HIV virus.

Thanks to Benjamin Sek, our office IT genius who cleaned up the CPU's internals and re-formated and reloaded all the drivers. I'm so bad with computers. I also have to thank friends Dinesh and Sriram for putting up with my 11pm calls for help with the PC ('Hey, sorry hope you're not asleep yet....but how do I load the CD into the CD-ROM?' and similarly dumb stupid questions') HEY GUYS!!! the crisis with my PC is OVER!!!! Pick up my calls will'ya???

This PC thing can get addictive. I just added on an Epson Stylus 830 photo printer for $100 and am now eyeing those cool flashing neon line lights that trigger a whole jiggle of groovy disco lights every time the CD-ROM or a: reads a disc!

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SCV cable took back HBO, Cinemax, AXN Movies and a couple of Hindi channels......... gee....byeeeee..... and good riddance and hello smaller cable bills!

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Wife wants us to go somewhere 'cold' at the end of the year for a holiday. Please God let it be Chiang Mai and not Switzerland!

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Genna's picked up this weird habit of showing off her navel to strangers recently...

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I'll install the next entry after I get back from Jakarta and Sulawesi. Bye!