Tattoo talk

Some conversations with the staff nurses can be very interesting. When I was on call on Thursday I sat at the pantry with Kak Burak and Winnie amongst others and the conversation started to drift to tattoos.

“I saw one old guy upstairs with really nice tattoos. Those bunga terung,” I remarked.

“Oh, you shouldn’t play-play with those Dr Aizat. In the old days you were not allowed to have a bunga terung tattoo unless you have taken a head,”

“Eh what about all those kids with bunga terungs one?”

“Those are modern tattoos. In the old days one head meant one bunga terung. If you see a tattoo of a complete band around an upper arm, it means that he was a brave warrior. An incomplete band however...”

“Not so brave? Who decides who gets what tattoo?”

“Yes... not so brave. The chief head hunter. At my house there are five heads,”

“What? Your house? Where?”

“My longhouse. They scare me sometimes,”

“What kind of Iban is scared of heads?”

“Modern Ibans.”

So the conclusion that I can draw from such conversations are thus – modern Ibans sometimes just simply get traditional tattoos without regard to old traditions (which may actually be a good thing especially if ‘old traditions’ meant someone should lose his head) because they are afraid of heads.

Progress

Everyone seems to be moving on with their lives. Everyone I know that is. Earlier this week I received a formal email inviting me to CS's wedding in Singapore. Then there is the thing where Sarah and Adil got married. Heck even some of the staff in our operating theatre got married over the past month. The only close friend that I know of that has yet to get married is Iris, and even she is making reasonably good progress towards it.

The whole Sarah and Aidil thing came as a bit of a surprise to me especially since they were not 'together' when I left Kajang. Guess things can really move very fast sometimes. I guess there is no harm in admitting that at one point in time I did ask her out. But I guess it was pretty obvious then that I wasn't really going to take it seriously and I suppose the whole story about me and my ex girlfriend must have been going around and therefore she must have decided that I wasn't going to be a good time investment.

I got rather close to CS when I was studying in Middlesbrough. We were the only two Malaysians there as far as we knew and we did go on trips together. I will be attending her wedding next week in Singapore but it seems that she has been hanging around some very successful bunch and I'm not sure that a lowly Malaysian civil servant from Sibu like myself can fit in. For a start the wedding requires 'formal' attire. I don't have any suit with me, or rather, I don't have any that I can still fit into. So I need to go find one. In addition to that I will be going alone and I doubt I will see anyone familiar there. It might end up being a rather miserable little trip but I guess it's important for me to be there - important for me at least, though I can't exactly explain why.

Of Things Lost 2

I finally confessed about the pen drive. This was about 2 weeks ago. Actually it was the houseman that asked me about it. I was quick to point out that i got her a replacement. To my (pleasant) surprise, she was not too unhappy about it. Rather, she was quite excited about getting the new rubber man pen drive. Maybe because it’s 32GB, maybe the whole cute looking thing actually worked.

Anyway, I’m just glad that that little problem has been solved.

iPad Rant

I have been messing around with my iPad for the past one week or so now and I feel like I should share some thoughts about it. Quite simply, it’s great. It’s a whole new way of doing some computing elements. Notice there I mentioned ‘some’ rather than saying it IS ‘a whole new way of computing’. It has some severe limitations when compared to ‘traditional’ computing. Especially when compared to a PC.

Let’s start with what it’s great for. It’s absolutely brilliant for internet browsing. No nonsense. Some of the apps just makes the internet look so different when compared to PCs. Social networks, youtube, facebook etc are just so effortless and a whole lot prettier. It’s also very portable. A lot more portable than my current Dell laptop. However, I have yet to experience it’s mobile internet capabilities. The reason is as follows – yesterday I went to the big Celcom service centre in town (big for Sibu) hoping that I can somehow convert my current mobile broadband subscription to be compatible with my iPad. I already have a TMNet landline with WiFi in my home (which sucks – it’s a lot less stable than the mobile broadband, slower, and customer service is the legendary rude-slow-inefficient sorry excuse of customer service that TM is famous for. The only thing it’s got going for it is the fact that there is no download limit. Hell, if celcom would introduce a service with no download limit, I’ll switch over in a heart beat).

The ladies there said they could extract the SIM card inside my dongle to make it compatible with the iPad’s requirement for a micro SIM card. What I didn’t realise was that ‘extracting’ meant to put the poor sod under a stapler like device and physically breaking it into a smaller component. I watched in horror as they broke my Chinese dongle and tried to refashion it like a month old Orthopaedic Houseman fiddling and trying to refashion with a Bangla’s finger after an industrial accident.

In the end they admitted that they completely broke it and whatever was left of my dongle was no longer usable (much like the aforementioned Bangla’s digit). So they offered me a new SIM card that was then inserted into my iPad. I didn’t try it out immediately (which was perhaps a mistake) but when I got home it still had no internet connection of its own. I was about to make another trip to the big Celcom service centre (big for Sibu) when I realised that the last time they gave a replacement SIM card for my phone, it took 3-5 working days before it finally started working. So I’ll wait until next week and see what happens.

The downside of the iPad is that there are in fact quite a lot of limitation as to what you can do with just a slab of glass as an input device. No right click, no proper keyboard, and form an office work and gaming perspective lags behind a proper computer quite significantly. Apple also seems to insist that I use its proprietary software (iTunes, iCloud etc) to transfer simple files like photos and documents between my PC and the iPad. Simply connecting it via the cable provided doesn’t allow me to just drag and drop my photos into the iPad. In short, Apple won’t let go of you once you bought into one of their products. Thus, I am inclined to believe that Apple - despite all that Mac vs PC bullshit and it’s bitching about Microsoft’s monopoly – is in fact just another Microsoft, albeit one with less revenue than the latter. And where is the wisdom of not having a USB port? What if a colleague passes me pendrive so that I can view her presentation (and some potentially raunchy photos – I wish)? Not having a USB slot kinda makes it a crippled laptop as far as my current working environment is concerned.

Anyway here are some apps that I have downloaded and what I think of them:

Flipboard

Amazing! The description on its download page just doesn’t do it justice. It’s more than just a program that turns everything into a magazine. It’s like a search engine that reads my mind.

Snapseed

It’s not Instagram and it definitely doesn’t even come close to Canon’s Digital Photo Professional (which I use on my PC). And certainly it’s nowhere near Photoshop as far as photo editing is concerned. However, what it (severely) lacks in power and popularity it makes up for in its brilliantly intuitive interface and user friendliness.

iBooks

It’s crap. This is the number one reason for me to get an iPad and this app is shit... in Malaysia. The number of available books to download is miniscule. There is hardly any bestsellers, no academic book worthy of the title and whatever is available is only limited to classics (and even these are only there because some nice fellows at Project Guthenberg decided that some works of literature needed saving). When I tried downloading Kindle so that I can at least find something on Amazon, I got an error message. Apparently Kindle is NOT available in Malaysia too. So Malaysia is crap... because of TM.

Office₂ HD

This is also crap. Worse still, I actually paid for it because I thought it was a really suitable program for working with office documents on the go. Serves me right for choosing the cheapest office suite for the iPad. I can hardly do anything with it as far as office documents go. This is THE reason why the computer cannot be replaced by the iPad.

Blogger (iPad/iPhone app)

I wrote this on a PC. Enough said...

Missed Opportuniities

Some events happen only once (or maybe twice) in a lifetime. While others happen only once a year. When you miss chances like these there is inevitably a certain measure of regret. However, the thought as an individual I am merely another speck upon this vast universe does help to somewhat alleviate the sense of loss.

I totally missed out on the transit of venus yesterday. It’s an astronomical event that will never occur again in my lifetime and I didn’t get to see it. Not that I would be able to see them personally since I don’t have the proper equipments, without which I might damage the sensor on my beloved camera or worse, my own eyes. Still it would’ve been nice to be able to tell kids when I get older that I saw the transit of venus during my lifetime.

I also completely blew my chances of getting into the Gawai celebration. I was on call on the night before Gawai itself and two days later. Besides, I didn’t get any invitation to go ‘ngabang’. However, according to Kak Burak, I didn’t need any. The saying goes that if it is Gawai, the Ibans will invite in anyone and anything who passes by, even if it was a dog. Two of the new staff nurses from Kelantan and Terengganu did however go for ngabang during Gawai, and from their description, it seems that I have missed out on something really awesome. Apparently there were singing and dancing and free flow tuak all day and night. Sigh... I came all the way here and still I miss out on such things...

The consolation is of course there is always next year.

I went to Red Carrot for lunch today as I was post call and I always like to treat myself whenever I have a bad call (which seems to be always the case). Dr Maz told me about the place. It’s on top of the Sugar Bun Restaurant near Delta Mall. As usual I went alone. The food was nothing spectacular but ambience was rather nice (for Sibu at least). For RM 6.50 I got the rice with kari nyonya kapitan and a mango drink (not mango juice, it was clearly some form of cordial).

The place is a bit like Old Town’s where they serve mainly Malaysian food in a slightly cleaner environment.

The Long Weekend

The thing that is most talked about in the New iPad is the Retina Display. I had my reservations about it at first as it was nearly impossible to appreciate it looking at reviews on the internet and magazines. However, the display is truly stunning! I’ve been facebooking on my iPad and coming back to my PC seems like a step down. And my PC has an AMD HD graphics card in it!

However, the blogger app on the iPad kinda sucks as it was optimized for the iPhone instead of its larger cousin and voice dictation as is demonstrated in my previous post is not very accurate.

It’s the Gawai weekend and although I was post call yesterday, I will be oncall again tomorrow. I didn’t get to see any celebration as I wondered around Sibu town yesterday despite it being the 1^st day of Gawai. I guess most of the action would have taken place at longhouses rather than in town. Town was not as quiet as I expected despite my seeing many people were leaving for ‘balik kampong’ over the past week.

I am really bad at ICU calls. I still have got to do them though. I just feel that I am not ready for this...

 

I finally found out that ‘Gayu Guru Gerai Nyamai’ in fact meant ‘Health and Longevity’.

I bought this little speaker to compliment my iPad. I think I’ll take it for my Singapore trip next month along with my camera (naturally). At least I won’t get too bored waiting for the airplanes.

iZat's New Aipad

This is my first post from my new iPad. I will be testing this out so I will not correct any spelling mistakes that eat me. Jenny Sophia has not been very accurate. Maybe it's my accent. Actually I got it I had about two days ago right before my on call. Google purpose of this of course so that I can download books for free. So far I have downloaded the ministries ICU protocols and it has been quite useful. I'm ready surprised that you know the ICU SICU NOS ICU. That last sentence didn't make sense at all. I will continue this post in a new entry using a more traditional way.