After settling in at the hotel I walked over to Victoria Street, past the National Heritage Board building pictured below and caught a number 2 bus down to Eu Tong Sen Street, alighted in Chinatown, and went for a walk to my favourite eating haunt. I used the integrated electronic ticketing system that one can use with the trains and buses here in Singapore. If only they could get it to work in Sydney.

Shao Ping and I used often ate at the Tai Pei Eating House in Trengannu Street. My meal was predictable. The staff know what I will order. I always have the hot plate beef with ginger and some vegetables plus a little chilli sauce. And steamed rice. And a glass of beer. I followed that with home-made ice lemon tea.

Singapore is constantly changing. I would not be surprised if Singapore forms part of the definition for change in the Oxford dictionary. As I walked through Chinatown I noticed that the Housing Development Board flats were being upgraded. Lift wells that serviced every floor were being retrofitted to the structure. Prior to that the elevators stopped at every sixth floor. A resident that lived on the 8th floor, for example, would alight at the 6th floor and climb the stairwell to the 8th floor. Compare the photograph of the block below with this one taken in 2003 and this earlier view from 2000.

I went for a walk around Chinatown after dinner. I noticed that the Hong Lim Housing Development Board flats had also been given a fresh coat of paint. That is the third upgrade I had witnessed for these flats during the last three years. Some of earlier photographs of the same area taken in 2000 can be seen here.

I kept walking and taking more photographs as I had done in 2000. The old building on the corner of Ann Siang Road and Club Street has been renovated. It had been in a sad state back in 2000.

During my stay in Singapore I had taken many photographs around the Chinatown area documenting the change, the people and the events. These photographs area available in these galleries: Chinatown Scenes 2003, Chinese New Year 2003, Singapore Visit April 17th 2005 and the View from Chinatown 2000.

Today I had the very good fortune to fly from Sydney to Singapore aboard one of Singapore Airline’s new Airbus A380 jets. As I waited in the departure lounge I managed to capture a couple of photographs as it landed. I used digital zoom so the images are not that clear.

After that I took some photographs of the A380 as it was divested of its pasengers and cargo. the sun was streaming in from behind the subject. The glass was double layered. I was intrigued by the shape of the wings and the profile of the fuselage.

The inflight entertainment system was excellent. There were hundreds of movies and television shows on demand. Countless music tracks. You could even create your own playlist. In addition to that there were news-feeds from AAP, language lessons, business lessons and a built in OS that allowed you to create a word processing document, spreadsheets and the like.

The controller sat in a recess beneath the extra large video screen. It was not located in the arm rest. The controller also acted as the keyboard and mouse. On top of all this you could save your work to your thumb drive courtesy of the USB port. There was also a video jack and a network port that was probably Ethernet.

During the last few weeks Shao Ping and I have been re-organising our home. Following that downpour in December we decided that it was not such a good idea to have so much stuff downstairs. Our neighbour Dale who helped us to quickly move a lot of stuff upstairs agreed. We had created a rather nice study downstairs where we had our books, records, CDs and files. It was a nice place to escape. There was a sofa and a good desk.

But when that water started flowing in and we had to start shifting all the stuff closest to the floor upstairs it was essentially a pain. Now, we really do not want to go through that again so the books are coming upstairs. Maybe that downpour will not happen again. Maybe it will. Given climate change I am not willing to take that risk. I am yet to sort out the records. I am going to sell some on eBay. Many of them are bootlegs by David Bowie.

Yesterday I went through boxes of old files. I even found stuff going back to my days in the ANZ bank as a young bloke. My training assignments, notebooks and guides were all there. I ended up in the audit department and that was quite enjoyable as I was able to travel far and wide as myself and other auditors inspected groups of branches in diverse regions. I would find myself in one horse towns that normally I would not get the chance to visit.

I thought I had cleared out most of that material before our move to Singapore years ago but there it was. I spent all of yesterday going through the files and most of them went into our paper recycling bin. Even old assignments from university, and paper work from my time at the Interactive Multimedia Learning Laboratory at the University of Wollongong. Time to let go. I kept a few files that were either typical or special but that was it. About 6 packing boxes of stuff was reduced to a small box. The rest will be recycled. I still have two more filing cabinets to go. Some of the old newspapers and historical documents I will take to school.

At one stage I was employed by the university to train at least two teachers from every school in the region how to use the Internet. The trained teachers would be the Internet Contact Persons for that school. Every Tuesday and Thursday a group of teachers would come to the university and I would teach them how to use Netscape, Alta Vista, gopher searches, etc and the various ways one could go ‘back’.

Now, you may find this difficult to believe but I always carried a back up of the Internet with me on a number of floppy discs when my training took me to sites other than the university. I had used the software WebWhacker to completely download some web sites including Volcano World, The Nine Planets and a couple of others. I copied the folders to a set of floppy discs. Of course I could not do that today as these web sites have increased dramatically in size. Back in 1996 and 1997 it was possible.

I was conducting a training session at the University of Wollongong’s Shoalhaven campus at Berry on the south coast of NSW. We were using some Windows PCs running Windows 3.1 if I remember correctly. Might have been Windows 95 but I doubt it. There was a great storm and a lightning strike broke our connection with the Internet.

We decided to have a tea break and I placed the contents of the floppy discs on the server. The participants copied those folders to the computers and they simply clicked on the index.htm file for each web site’s folder to explore that web site. As a result they could learn how to use the Netscape browser. They could learn all of the buttons and most of the menu items. They could still learn how to download images and text. Just about the only thing they could not do was conduct a search.

Later that day the connection to the Internet was restored and the participants could learn about searching the Internet using Alta Vista, WebCrawler, Infoseek and others. I always enjoyed showing the teachers how to filter and refine the Internet searches. Another neat trick was showing them the power of exploring directories by altering the url of a site. The workshops were always enjoyable. The only time I was reasonably distracted was when one participant insisted on using the mouse “upside down”. When they rolled the mouse towards themselves the cursor went up the screen and vice versa.

I found some old publications from back then. Later today I will scan a couple of them online and write a quick blog. I hope you will be amused, enlightened and perhaps a little intrigued.

I would love to read some of your stories from the early days of the Internet. Ten years ago is really not that distant but in terms of the Internet it seems to be ages ago.

This afternoon, my sister’s husband Kieran will be coming around to help us shift the bookcases upstairs. Then we shall all retire to the pool in our backyard and later a barbecue. Isn’t life good?

The Theban Mapping Project had its beginnings in 1978. Its aim is to develop and build a database of all of the archaeological artefacts of Thebes. Many artefacts were damaged by treasure hunters and inexact excavations in years past and the team of the TMP have been energetically working to catalogue, illustrate and map the ancient heritage of the area before any further damage is inadvertantly caused by climate, tourism or exposure.

As they point out on their web site they believe “that the first and most essential step in preserving this heritage is a detailed map and database of every archaeological, geological, and ethnographic feature in Thebes. Only when these are available can sensible plans be made for tourism, conservation, and further study.”

The team has created a superb web site which has been constantly evoloving as additional maps, images and details are added to the database. It is enriched with video, photographs, interactive maps and dynamic 3D imagery of the tombs. Even a quick exploration of the tomb of Ramesses II and the tomb that he built for his sons is sufficient to reveal how rich this resource is for students of Egyptian history.

The web site also features links to articles, a bibliography, timelines and a glossary. I believe it is one of the richest resourecs for this epoch of Egyptian history. It places the artefacts in a situated context strengthening their value for students of ancient Egyptian history.

Added five new galleries last night. The new galleries feature photographs taken at the NavCon2K7 Conference, Central Coast ~ NSW, places around Singapore, gatherings in Singapore and the Web 2.0 workshops at Nanyang Technological University.