boom businesses

observations about singapore: it seems that the two businesses that are doing best are the mobile phone and slimming/beauty industries. everywhere you go, there are mobile phone shops. literally for every 3 or 4 stores, 1 of them is a mobile phone shop. and if you look around, say, in the newspaper, there's 2 ads for slimming clinics on the first page, 1 on the last page, and maybe a couple more within the thin volume of Life!

the library's really nice, though, the one at ang mo kio! i just went there, they had a display, showing lava lamps and asked interested kids to go look up fluid dynamics, and a 3d holographic display that projected out of top of the case. cool. getting kids interested in science. props to them. borrowed 2 o'reilly books on linux, "running linux" and "linux in a nutshell". loan period is 3 weeks.

i've decided to go blading tomorrow, there's quite a few places nearby that would be nice to take my rollerblades to. went in to nanyang poly, near my house, where there's a hockey pitch, where we used to train. i'll probably blade there and go blading around the campus, since it's quite nice, and maybe head down to the park opposite the library, where we also used to train. that training was sprints and runs, that kind of stuff. quite shiong.

my liver ultrasound results are back, everything's normal. i'm planning to delete a windows partition on my hard drive and install linux. hopefully it won't be a problem that this is a laptop. there were several of feynman's books at the library.

i am glad to report that there have not been incidents with the multivitamin since the previous time. i have been sure to use a cup always, not a bottle. and according to some TV channel that was showing at the polyclinic, something like 1 out of 10 singaporeans has an IBS-type condition. that's really a lot of people! sounds fishy. but apparently it's that prevalent.

Digestive Disease Library
[ http://www.hopkins-gi.org/pages/latin/templates/index.cfm?pg=disease1&organ=6&disease=43&lang_id=1 ]

courts was selling this keyboard bundled with a wireless mouse for $28. was tempted to buy it though i had no use for it whatsoever. the nice thing about the keyboard was that it had something like 12 programmable hotkeys. and it was supposed to be new-generation ergonomic, with "A-shape"... kinda like this:

Welcome to www.A4Tech.com
[ http://www.a4tech.com/en/product2.asp?CID=2&SCID=14&MNO=KBS-627 ]

not exactly that one, but it's the same company. the wireless mouse runs on AAA batteries. on the miscellaneous side, i bought a refill for my pen and replacement "sponges" for the earpieces of my handphone's handsfree set. and 2 dozen AAA batteries for a dollar fifty. that's really cheap and i don't think the batteries are that lousy, though they're probably quite lousy lah. just keep replacing lor.

one thing about singapore's weather is that things like books go bad pretty fast. many of my books are browning... but still ok. my bike is still ok, so that can last a while. my backpack is also still ok, which is good. but me misses my lovey.