Wild Singapore’s Ria Tan noticed a spike in her readership. Scrutiny of the data revealed the main source to be the Uniquely Singapore website. When she sends me the link and I click to see that Yesterday.sg has also been added to this “What to see” page.
Both webpage owners/editor/community are elated that their feeds are reaching out to an even wider audience and that a government agency realises these logs do provide excellent resources for visitors.
Yes, this is certanly excellent indeed! I did, however, feel that STB, or probably rather their webpage vendor, should have clicked the “Contact Me” link on each page and let these hardworking individual/groups know.
Sherlock was all the rage in OS 8.5 in the late 90’s and survived to OS X, and now touts 10 default search channels including eBay.
I had forgotten all about it since web searches on good bandwidth are very fast these days, enough for me to discard many desktop tools that used to save my sanity in the days of the “World Wide Drip.”
The other day, though, I listed my application folder’s contents for some macnewbie friends and I saw Sherlock sitting there, all neglected. So I ran Sherlock and tried the eBay channel.
Now two commemorative books on the Duchess of Kent are on their way from the UK; the one about her Far East Tour I actually already have but want to circulate as second copy amongst the Pasir Panjang guides.They have to talk about her during the route from campus in February and July and the Far East Tour booklet helps us understand just why her visit to the army prompted a changing of the name of the ridge.
I sent the seller this page which she read. Its woefully outdated now that I look at it but there was enough for her to figure out why someone from Singapore would buy those books!
Looks like Sherlock can be dangerous in the wrong hands…
Meanwhile Kenneth has transcribed Mubin Sheppard’s article from The Straits Times from 1967. Good on yer, mate! I’d better Yesterday it once that server is back up…
This is a photos of my St. Andrew’s Junior College tie pin that I used in 1983-4. The college uniform was designed by the first batch of students and they threw in a tie to strangle generations that would come after them. So I wore a tie almost daily during term for two years and subsequently only wear one during convos.
We got used to them though - the biology students would tuck their ties in their shirts between the 2nd and 3rd buttons during dissections to prevent blood splatter. Securing the pin was a problem and I used to always get help from a literature buff I knew.
The junior college later reverted to using the secondary school badge in the 90’s to unite the school. SAJC physically moved back to Woodville to form the St. Andrew’s Village in 2005.
I met a bunch of JC-mates after 24 years and we used a facebook group to hold our photos. I took a quick shot of my old tie pin for the group page until a scan of a report card could be made.
We walked 35 people last Sunday to Bukit Chandu; it’s always nice having the company of people who are willing to wake up for a 7am walk!
I stayed at home during the two days of CNY hols and that helped me recover enough to do the walk. It helped that the weather was warm and dry - the right conditions for me to function. So no signs of the chest cold reappearing after the walk.
This session has the least structure of any walk the Toddycats conduct. But the group has been together long enough to comfortably handle the various demands; the narrative is only one.
Each Chinese New Year, I find myself thinking about the events of 1942. On 8th February, after yet another a day of bombing, the landings began in the evening.
At 8.30pm on February 8 [1942], Australian machine gunners opened fire on vessels carrying a first wave of 4,000 troops from the 5th and 18th Divisions towards Singapore island. The Japanese assaulted Sarimbun Beach, in the sector controlled by the Australian 22nd Brigade under Brigadier Harold Taylor.”
“Dispositions, 22nd Brigade, 10 p.m. 8th February” from Lionel Wigmore, 1957, Australia in the War of 1939–1945, Volume IV - The Japanese Thrust, “Chapter 15 — Defence of Western Area” (1st ed.; Australian War Memorial, Canberra), p. 310. [pdf]
I came across this interesting slideshow of images from the time of the Battle of Singapore to present-day memorials, put together by “Crusader,” and another video with clips, some that were subsequently coloured, I think, including the one with the 1939 song, “We’ll meet again.” That has the bit with Cyril Wild tossing (or dropping?) the white flag on the way to the Ford Factory.
“Albrecht believes that this is a new type of sadness. People are feeling displaced. They’re suffering symptoms eerily similar to those of indigenous populations that are forcibly removed from their traditional homelands. But nobody is being relocated; they haven’t moved anywhere. It’s just that the familiar markers of their area, the physical and sensory signals that define home, are vanishing. Their environment is moving away from them, and they miss it terribly.
Albrecht has given this syndrome an evocative name: solastalgia. It’s a mashup of the roots solacium (comfort) and algia (pain), which together aptly conjure the word nostalgia. In essence, it’s pining for a lost environment. “Solastalgia,” as he wrote in a scientific paper describing his theory, “is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home.’”"
I just switched the Pasir Panjang Heritage blog to Blogspot: pasirpanjangheritage.blogspot.com - so glad I finaly sorted this out. Have more than few things to post there which I’ve put off.
It used to be on the Habitatnews server (due to limitations with image hosting) but Blogger is faster now and I wanted some of the new template options, which is only possible when you host your blog on blogspot.
I do wish they’d provide templates with at least a 500 pixel width for text - that would allow embedding Flickr images more quickly as 500 pixels is one of Flickr’s default sizes - and that is convenient for MarsEdit too which can reference your Flickr account for recently uploaded images. Anyway I prefer a 500 pixel image to a miserable 400 pixel width image anyday. Grrr…
If I figured out how to widen the template (think I know but it looks like hard work), I’d shift this blog to Blogger in a jiffy! I hate the restrictions in WordPress which prevent me from messing up my sidebar but only inserting widgets they provide. I miss my Jaiku!
For some reason I am thinking of a dock in Beaufort, North Carolina. I must be tired.
I am often asked about specific events and am glad I can point to so many alternatives these days. But there are so many and hard to keep up to date or even remember!
At a teacher’s workshop yesterday, NHB introduced a GCal-like heritage calendar with email, rss and ical subscription options. And an easy to remember URL: heritagecalendar.sg/
Last July I went on a National Stadium farewell tour hosted by May and other friends at the Sport Museum. At the time Kenneth (who had attended an earlier public tour by May) had compiled the lovely series of articles featured in Today. In addition, there were several articles in the blogosphere and many photo albums. The depth and diversity of my own memories surprised me, let alone those of others. I shared all of this with May during the tour and she was excited that people had so many stories to share.
Being Friends of Yesterday.sg, we suggested we invite blog posts which could eventually be compiled and permanently hosted by the Sports Museum on their new webpage. The material could be drawn upon for the new museum when it re-opens. For once this wasn’t a mad rush and seemed like a feasible idea.
The Sports Museum staff eventually moved out to a location nearby and last December, May wrote me to catch up. I enthusiastically responded with a five section outline and we eventually decided to meet in the New Year. Kenneth served up a reminder and now I have to step up. Since Yesterday.sg’s NHB staff just finished their “media luncheon” yesterday, I suggested we all meet today at 9.30am.
So I’m going to hop on to bus number 16 at Orchard Road (Brash Basah - Nicoll Highway - Stadium Road/Walk/Crescent) and hope I find that warehouse-looking temporary office of theirs behind McDonald’s. You can see I’m a bit vague as to where exactly it is
If that meeting finishes in an hour or so, I will have time to prepare for my talk in the afternoon at SMU…on heritage. I think I should be suitably inspired.
