Hello friends and countrymen, lend me your ears! It is Saturday morning and the end of week 8 here in beautiful downtown Singapore. It is also hopefully my last day of the lingering cold/flu – not sure which. But I figure when Monday and Tuesday the fever was close to 100 or 101 actually by Tuesday night, I officially get to stay home. Easy to do because I don’t have to take any sick time! Ha! Yet boring too because it impacts my ability to get out and explore. I already know what our apartment looks like. Now I really know. Today it lingers a little – that stupid sinus crap, but all in all a much better, sunny day.
This afternoon is a huge kite festival in our area. I’ll have to get some pictures to explain that one better.
Have I talked about TV here yet? Maybe that will be my topic for today. First of all, I really enjoy catching up with John Stewart and Stephen Colbert on the web. We don’t get many channels here and I am happy I can get my factual, non-biased, doesn’t make me laugh, reporting from those two. Plus, who has time to sit in front of the TV and watch these conventions every morning? Nightime for you, morning for me. Just a lot of speeches, some with actual numbers and some with stuff about leading something.
As far as TV, we get an edited version of HBO, some Fox and Universal channels, BBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, Fox news, yada yada yada. The one nice thing is no advertising on many of these channels. Sure, there are commercials but they are for other shows on the same channel. This means most shows are 50 minutes in length. That means they have annoying start times such as 10:00, 10:50, 11:40, etc. What is cool is all the Fox shows and movies are on one channel. And one channel is dedicated to crime shows!
What is not cool is some of the series are one year behind. Also, every show is subtitled in Mandarin. No option to turn this on of off (and no, not the news channels). I think is distracts YAW because often she reads the text and is not listening to the dialogue. What is funny is sometimes they will block out a word, bleep it, in a show but the text will show it! At least that is what I have been told.
As far as the timing of the series, even though many are behind, at least this is not true for True Blood but is true for most sitcoms. Oh, and we think we can get Strikeback if we add Cinemax. However, the movies and shows are somewhat edited for Singapore. This means we know some scenes we remember from seeing the movie before are now missing! Amazingly enough though, the TV part of the cable is pretty cheap. Maybe because we have only about 40 channels and of those, 10-12 are the same channel in HD. The Internet service is where we pay the money – the $80 per month – but it is 100 megs which is nice and fast and handy for The Daily Show.
There are some other funny things such as how the online guide works here or the DVR’s ability to easily record. Coming from DirectTV-land, the technology here seems so primitive! Overall it works and the previous tenant left behind his 40″ flat screen which meant one less thing to buy.
Well it is almost time to venture out, find food because we absolutely have come to the realization we are too lazy to cook at home, ever, get an Apple TV (I want movies!), YAW to get her nails done, etc.
Tonight we are going to a coworker’s home to have dinner with a few other of YAW’s coworkers. I think I am actually the only spouse invited. That of course means there will be multiple conversations about work, their work, therefore I will play World Welder.