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2 Jan 2013 – Ashley started P1 this year at CHIJ (Kellock), a school that isn’t too far away from our house although not nearly as convenient to go compared to Chinese Kindergarten. She wasn’t scared at all on starting her first day of school thanks to all those years of pre-school and kindergarten. Here are some of the highlights of the day.

Sitting amongst the other kids in Earth class. There are 3 Ashley’s in the same class, the teacher is going to get confused!

Lining up outside her class getting ready to go home.

Ashley learning how to buy food at the canteen.

Going home time! Sitting in the hall according to bus numbers.

The vision statement of Ashley’s school.

Our family has grown by 2! Today, we welcome the addition of Mocha and Ollie, our dear 4 month old silver tabby coloured Maine Coon and cream bi-coloured Ragdoll respectively. Though of different parents and breed, they were coincidentally born on the same date, i.e. 27 Jul 2012, and have since grown to become the best of friends. The girls simply adore them and we really look forward to them growing up together!

These boys are so close they not only play and eat together but sleep together in the same pattern too!

Speaking of growing up, Maine Coons and Ragdolls are really huge breeds and some can reportedly grow to over 10-15kg, the size of a medium dog. Gonna be fun if that happens!

18-20 Aug 2012 – Singapore is the last place I’d think of visiting for a vacation, especially since our family stays in Singapore. However, on wifey’s advice, I went along with her suggestion of a 3D2N stay at Sentosa thanks to a promotion that included buffet breakfast and dinner for S$1300. The idea seemed a little silly at first since in my mind there wasn’t anything worthwhile doing in Sentosa other than visiting Universal Studios.

Turns out I was wrong!

View of the pool area from the restaurant at the Rasa Sentosa Resort.

Firstly, the hotel we stayed at – Rasa Sentosa Resort – has a lot of things going for it.
1) The hotel restaurant, Silver Shell Cafe, has a really good seafood buffet dinner every Fri and Sat night. We piled on the crabs, crayfishes and prawns till we were so stuffed. There’s also free flow of ice cream, an assortment of cakes and a chocolate fountain to wrap off dinner.
2) There’s a 2-storey indoor tree house with a slide that goes into a pool of coloured balls which is great fun for the kids.
3) A big pool area for cooling off from the tropical sun and humidity.
4) Free and unlimited wireless.
5) A short walk away from the bus stop which has buses to other parts of the island.
6) Right next to Underwater World, where the fish spa is.

Other highlights of the trip

1) The Pythons
Every since my visit to Sentosa way back in 1996, these pythons outisde Underwater World have been an ever present sight. Ashley really liked touching the pythons although the same couldn’t be said for Alicia, who prefered to look on from a safe distance. Photos with the pythons cost $6 per person.

The friendly python outside Underwater World. Ashley was very brave and kept wanting to touch the big slithery snake.

2) MegaZip Adventure Park

The main attraction here is undoubtedly the 450m free-fall zipline that takes one over the jungle canopy to Siloso Beach in under a minute. There’s also a 3 level ariel obstacle course called ClimbMax consisting of wobbly tightropes, bridges and cargo nets that definitely looks easier from the ground then when you’re on it. Ashley was the only one in the family who dared to try both the MegaZip and ClimbMax.

Start of the MegaZip firefox drop.

3) Fish Spa

There is a fish spa right next to Underwater World that offers 2 sizes of fishes – big and small (just can’t remember the exotic fish names!). Ashley loved the fish spa so much that we went there 3 days in a row. It’s hard to describe how being nibbled on by fish feels like, but many customers couldn’t take the intense feeling that they gave up after only a few seconds. After much laughter and loud squeals.

These are the small ones and when tens of them nibble at you at once, it feels like mini electric shocks up your feet.

4) Skyline Luge

Riding the luge is like riding a go-kart, but one that utilizes gravity instead of fuel. The only complaint I have is that the 650m course was over too soon!

This is the Skyline ride that takes people back to the top of the hill after the luge ride.

If you’re thinking of a short getaway without the hassle of a long plane or boat ride, Sentosa is definitely a viable choice now with the whole island transformed over the last few years with new and exciting attractions for the whole family!

For various work and e-banking website compatibility reasons, I moved off Firefox about a year ago and have been using IE extensively ever since. Lately though, because of weird Facebook behaviour in IE (e.g. constantly flickering comment box anyone?), I decided to revisit an old friend and downloaded Firefox 11. The most immediately annoying thing that struck me was how Firefox decided to incorporate Ask.com as it’s default keyword search engine!

Defaut keyword search – typing search terms directly into the browser address bar rather than in the search bar. In fact, IE9 has done away with a separate search bar entirely.

In order to change the keyword search from Ask.com back to Google, this is what you need to do:
1) In the address bar, type about:config. You might get a weird warning but it is ok to proceed.
2) Search for the keyword.URL config string and change the value to http://www.google.com/search?q=
3) Done!

It’s been 2 years since we last put up the Christmas tree (due to space constraints or overall laziness) but upon Ashley’s insistence, we put up a smaller version in the bedroom this year. The fun of digging through layers and layers of boxes in the storeroom aside, I must admit, having the tree up with sparkling lights and lined with presents underneath did spruce up the place considerably!

Ashley counting down to Christmas every night instead of counting sheep.

I had to attend a wedding dinner this year so didn’t get to join the family for the annual Christmas Eve dinner. Wifey was nice enough to bring back leftovers like lasagne and cheese cake though which I gobbled up for breakfast the next day. There’s no escaping those calories!

Christmas Day was spent attending church service in the morning followed by lunch at Marche at Somerset 313. Alicia got into a bit of a fight with another older boy at Marche over a toy at the play area and bonked him on the head with a woodern horse! So much for being nice and not naughty.

The highlight of the day was returning home to open presents! Here are some pictures before and after.

On your mark… get set…

Go!

All done!

Being a part time photographer, it was only a matter of time when I would run out of storage space again thanks to the massive number of RAW files in my archive. So, over the weekend, I made an attempt to replace the four Western Digital 2TB Green drives (WDC WD20EARS-00S8B1 80.0) in my TS-459 Pro with four Hitachi 3TB drives (Hitachi HDS723030ALA640 MKAO). The drives were running in RAID-5 configuration meaning that I would end up with 9TB of usable space, up from 6TB.

Strangely though, after swapping a WD drive for the Hitachi one (after selecting the Expand Capacity option and clicking the Change button on one of the drives), my NAS would not recognize the 3TB drive and kept prompting me to “insert a disk”. Luckily, there is a solution thanks to this post on the QNAP forums.

For me, I didn’t have to run the Hitachi GPT Disk Manager at all. These are the steps that worked for me. Note that I’m running Windows 7 64-bit with all the latest patches.

1. Plug Hitachi 3TB drive into an external drive bay connected to my main PC via eSATA. Note: I’m sure this would work too if you connected the drive via internal SATA.
2. Go to the Disk Management tool.
3. Upon loading, a pop-up will appear prompting you to initialize the disk. Choose the GPT (GUID Partition Table) option.



4. Once done, create a New Simple Volume on the drive and do a quick NTFS format as part of the process.
5. After formatting, you can plug the 3TB HDD into the NAS. Wait for a few seconds and it will be recognised and the RAID array would start rebuilding.

I hope this post helps whoever is upgrading the drives in their NAS too.

As an aside, I happen to be one of the lucky ones who never had problems with the WD Green drives in my QNAP at all.

Update 27 Sep 2011: Ok, it looks like the above only worked with Bays 2, 3 and 4. Bay 1 just refuses to detect my 3TB drive no matter what. I have contacted QNAP via their online support form so let’s see how long they take to reply and what they say. Not feeling very optimistic now…

Update 29 Sep 2011: I totally take back what I said during my earlier update. The very next day after filling out the support form, a QNAP engineer contacted me and offered to remote desktop into my PC to troubleshoot the problem. So that’s what we did today morning using tools like TeamViewer (for remote desktop) and PuTTY (for SSH into the NAS). After running a number of commands, swapping in and out the 3TB drive, reboots, he finally managed to resolve the issue (some corruption with the partition table). The NAS has spent the whole day rebuilding the RAID, and subsequently extending the total space from 6TB to 9TB which took around 10 hours in total. Double thumbs up to the QNAP folks for their excellent level of service, technical knowledge (it’s a BIG difference getting an engineer to look into your issue vs some customer service rep over the phone who knows ziltch about the internals of their products) and quick turnaround. I know which brand I’m sticking to when I need to upgrade my NAS!

After many headaches with Brinkster over the years, I finally decided to migrate my blog to Bluehost and domain hosting to Go Daddy today. What disappointed me was the outdated version of PHP used which meant that I couldn’t upgrade to WordPress 3.2.1 and MySQL which prevented me from using MySQL Workbench. The migration took a couple of hours, involving the transfer of my domain name and blog content, themes, plug-ins and settings. So far so good and I’ll be monitoring if Bluehost is an improvement over Brinkster during the next couple of days.

One thing that I’ll miss about Brinkster though is their excellent 24×7 online chat support. Their operators are usually very responsive and helpful but often times held back by poor infrastructure. Let’s hope that I’ll not need to contact support so often at Bluehost.

After coming down with tonsil infections 5 times this year, I finally bit the bullet and consulted an Ear Nose Throat (ENT) specialist to find out what was wrong with me. Five infections in a year is not normal and each incident was worse than the previous one in terms of duration, fever and pain. I had the feeling that antibiotics were becoming less and less effective too when the most recent infection was still not healed after 2 weeks. Thus, when surgery was proposed, I jumped on the thought of fixing the problem once and for all.

On Friday 17 Sep 2011, I had tonsillectomy done at Gleneagles and the operation was over in around an hour. I had a look at the Swedish meatball-sized tonsils that they removed afterwards and was really glad that they were out of my system. I then spent the next 2 nights in the hospital recuperating and enjoying the excellent hospital service. I’m really glad I chose Gleneagles to have my surgery done at as post-op care was excellent. The nurses there were very attentive and made sure that I was always as comfortable as possible. They were very swift in responding to requests like prompty stopping my Morphine drip after I started complaining of nausea the next morning and bringing me ice cream/milk/toast in the middle of the night. They also have free wi-fi, cable TV and daily newspapers so I was never bored. Wifey, Ashley and Alicia also visited me on Friday and Saturday to keep my spirits up.

Now on day 7 into my recovery, I’m glad to report that the pain isn’t as bad as I feared. My throat is still pretty swollen, making me sound odd when I talk, but at least the sharp pains are few and far between. I think the medication prescribed (antibiotics, Arcoxia and Panadol) really helped with that. I heard that the pain would get worse when the scabs start to fall off but we’ll see! I’ve also been drinking McD milkshakes and eating ice cream almost every day (can’t think of a better excuse to do so!) which is really soothing on the throat (but probably not so good for body fat). If all goes well, I should be a-ok in a few day’s time.

The only not-so-good news – the $7k+ hospital bill. Luckily, some of it is covered by company insurance and Medisave, but still… ouch!

28 – 29 Dec 2009 – I have many fond memories of Blenheim from our honeymoon back in 2003. Blenheim is situated in the Malborough region, a place famous for its many vineyards and wineries. Blenheim seems to have grown quite a bit since 2003 and is no longer the small town that we remembered. Unfortunately, our stay this time was pretty short so we didn’t have a chance to go on any wine tours. Not a big loss though; it took us almost 7 years to finish the two bottles of wine that we bought during out last trip so buying wine wasn’t very high on the agenda.

We arrived in Blenheim to really gorgeous golden evening light. Thanks to that, we made a snap decision to drive up to the hills to take some pictures for Project New Zealand. After consultation with the motel owner, we settled on Wither’s Hill Farm Park, a short 10-15 minute drive away from where we were staying. The hike up the hill was another thing however, and by the time we reached the middle, the sun had already started setting. Such a pity!

Ashley walking up Wither’s Hill Farm Park while trying to avoid the many clumps of cow dung.

Probably the only decent shot we got halfway up the hill. This was taken at around 8-9pm and the moon was already up in the sky.

Ashley getting in on the picture.

On the way down, Ashley tripped on some gravel and scraped her knee pretty badly. I’m not sure if it was the pain or the sight of blood but she ended up crying all the way back to the motel. Luckily the motel owner had some first aid supplies so we managed to clean the wound and get her knee bandaged. I remember teaching her how to play cards that night to distract her from the pain.

The next day, we had lunch at the Montana Winery, a place where we enjoyed a really nice lunch in 2003. Sadly, the menu had changed and the food wasn’t as nice as before. There must have been a management change during these few years!

Lunch at the Montana Winery.

View the full Blenheim photo album here.

27 – 28 Dec 2009 – Christchurch was hit by a devastating 7.1 magnitude earthquake in Sep 2010, almost a year after we visited and I remember opening the morning papers to see a picture of how the tower at Christchurch Cathedral had collapsed. It was a sad sight to see as the cathedral was one of the most beautiful structures we had visited during our time in New Zealand.

The tower behind us collapsed during the quake. I wonder if they have rebuilt it yet…

Inside the cathedral – it was fairly empty as choir practice had just ended.

Ashley also had fond memories of spending time in the cathedral square playing on the bungee trampoline for two days in a row. I don’t know how she did it but she didn’t find being propelled 10-20m in the air scary at all!

Boing boing boing…

Apart from just hanging around the square, we didn’t really do much else in Christchurch. I hope we didn’t miss much!

Link to the full album here.