Identified a fellow Singapore Girl on the train today - the colours of the standard red on her toenails was a tell-tale sign. A short glimpse of her make up confirmed her identity. And the mention of 24 days left of leave + her conversation of not wanting to waste her one day leave sort of confirms everything.

Ok, I was evesdropping - I am not sure if that constitutes conversation mooching, but it was unintentional. Trust me. Not everyone speaks discretely, especially if they have to compete with the noise from the rails of the MRT.

I could have still been a Singapore Girl, but given the freak accident that happened to me last year, I don’t that that is possible - ever. Oh well, at least that permanently puts me onto another path of destruction. A path where, afters years after years after years of studies, would put me on par with a Bachelor’s degree holder on the salary scale - that’s very comforting to know.

However, I did sometimes wonder how life would have been like should I have continued. Perhaps I would have seen the world by now. Perhaps I would have married a nice guy and settled down in some exotic country. Perhaps I would have been so badly bullied by the crew that I would never want to fly again. Perhaps… there’s just too many ‘if’s.

There was also a recent discussion if they should retire the 35-year-old icon and mount on something else closer to the times. My personal opinion is that the move would be an enterprise suicide. The subservant Singapore Girl is already widely recognised and it would definitely be a shame to retire her. If you look around, there’s almost nothing or no one as distinct as the Singapore Girl in the airlines industry.

Besides, I still sometimes wished that I was there. But now… it’ll just remain as a dream

… is usually not a very fun thing to do. Not only do you not get enough things done, you probably won’t get enough rest. So, why do we stay overnight in the labs? Or for that matter, why do we even bother to stay up late to finish work?

First, there is a deadline. When the deadline is due or near, we would have to start rushing work, so that we don’t end up having to bribe 周公 (zhou1 gong1) for more time away from his chess games (a.k.a. losing sleep) at a later date.

Secondly, we might want to lessen the guilt of not working hard enough. Heh heh… I am always guilty of that. I could sometimes end up not working for 4 days out of 5 in the lab. So, we either end up burning our weekends or we add extra hours into the remaining 1 day by burning more hours.

Thirdly… it’s to keep someone else company.

Met Dr Ong at SGH today to discuss about a project which is struggling to see the daylights. Because of confidentiality, I don’t think I can say much things about it, but I do hope that the project will kick off soon. Now I am left to make some arrangements for the Profs of the different departments to come together so that we can at least have 1 decent meeting to decide on the fate of the project. Like Dr Ong said, there is a gem somewhere, we just need to know how to get to it.

And oh, getting lost in SGH is easy, especially if you are going to the basement of the hospital. There are apparently 2 exits from the lift; go out from the wrong entrance and you would have to look silly waiting for the next left to cross over to the other side….

Got some honest opinions from Dr Ong as well with regards to postgraduate medicine.  He mentioned that the older we get after we graduate with a Bachelor’s degree, the lesser the advantage (and perhaps probability) of getting into a medical school. This was with regards to the new Duke-NUS Graduate Medicine School which is taking in its first batch of students in August 2007.

I had initially wanted to apply for Duke-NUS, but that meant that I would have to pass my MCAT first. Even though admissions is not supposedly age-biased, but judging from the number of applications - and given 2 candidates of equal standing; the chances of selecting the younger one is higher. Of course, people would argue from the “experience” perspective - but hey, doing medicine is probably something so different from whatever jobs that the candidate has had or current has, “experience” may no longer weigh in as much.

The Singaporean mindset might not be ready to accept the fact that a 40-year-old doctor is not as experienced as his age tells. Then again, I am not sure which country’s mindset is. Of course, I have my Ph.D option now to consider, which probably seems to fall into place if I intend to apply for the 2009 intake - be it in Singapore or overseas.

Spoke to Hian Hou from Straits Times about FON today. James probably gave him a list of people that he’s given FON sets to. For those who don’t quite know what FONs is all about, do check it out here. It’s basically a principle/equipment which allows you to share your wireless bandwidth to a group of FON users (I am not sure if non-FON users can register; have not tried that yet). So what happens is that, as a FON-router owner, we get to select the kind of model that we want to share our bandwidth - fee-based or linux-model.

If we were to share our bandwidth for a fee, then we would have to pay a fee if we were to use someone else’s FON router to access the internet. If we were to share our bandwidth for free, then apparently we have free access. But then again, there are only 20 people (at the most) in Singapore having the FON router (courtesy of James), so the chances of me (us) seeing the benefits of FON in the works is really rare. The good thing about FONs is that authentication is taken care of, so we can share our bandwidth without worrying about people tapping on our networks for posting bomb hoaxes, and the amount of bandwidth allocated for sharing can be controlled, so we don’t have to worry about Garies playing online games with our wireless networks.

Moreover, it is illegal to resell bandwidth. I think it’s somewhere in the fine prints of whichever ISP’s service that you are utilizing.

My take is that, I will probably not charge for the bandwidth that I am sharing - the amount that I can collect is not worth the amount of legal implications that I might get myself into. In addition, I don’t think the amount is substantial anyway. Remember, prison got no broadband.

Went for my medical appointment which happened to be at SGH today. Waited for 30 mins for the doctor to be in, and another 30 mins for my turn. The appointment was supposed to be at 1410 hrs, but apparently, I was only seen at 1500 hrs. Sigh. The doctor was replacing my usual doctor, who got posted to KK Hospital.

Quite a nice chap, this Dr Chong. I like him for his candidness and his down to earth approach to what can be done to the scar. Most importantly, he’s realistic. The worst you can ever get from a doctor is one who is over-zealous and gives false hopes. On the other hand, you would not want someone who gives you no hope. Being a doctor is tough. You have to please your patients, and your spouse and your parents/parents-in-law, your neighbours and at the same time, project a good and caring image.

Just to side-track a little, you can get pretty good signal strength at SGH via Wireless@SG. If you haven’t signed up for it, you should try it. I supposed a local company. So should you. Met my financial advisor at People’s Park after that for him to update me on my portfolio. I think he forgot to update me on my portfolio, but he was trying to get me to diversify my funds. Oh well, I have 2 more years in Singapore before I decide where I would go. So, he has another 2 more years with me before I disappear permanently from this earth Singapore.

Going off to get some dinner. Chow!