Because David Ogilvy says so, I will no longer be writing in exclusively lower caps any longer. This announcement may seem pointless and entirely self-indulgent—because it is—but sadly occupies a large enough portion of my jaw-clenching, teeth-grinding consciousness for it to be an issue. (Also, because (a) it is actually difficult re-training myself to write in proper sentence case (I figure this won’t confuse me at work, as a convenient spillover) and (b) you know I hate non-uniformity, and having had three years’ worth of blog entries all in lower caps just makes me, well, want to continue with it. Just ’cause.

David Ogilvy didn’t say anything about starting sentences with “because”, however.

Yesterday, I was at Borders and I noticed they were selling AC adapters for those little booklight things you clip on your books. You know, that light them up. Well. I understand the already limited use of a booklight in this day and age of ceiling lighting and other sorts of convenient amenities like park lamps (surprisingly bright in some parks in Singapore), lighting in restaurants and cafes, lighting in planes and buses and subway trains—most places you’d like to read, unless you were say, a troll under a bridge or a cavedweller who’s burnt one book too many reading by a bonfire.

Some say they need it because it helps them read in bed with a sleeping partner next to them. No one’s heard of small, dimmer lights on your side of the bed then, or lamps with concentrated beams so they don’t illuminate the entire room.

So those things are portable, meant for random uncontrollable needs to stop in the middle of the road and read, perhaps. But an AC adapter? Okay, I’m going to assume that that means you’re indoors, with some sort of electrical wiring in place. Get a lamp. And in the event of a blackout, I’d hate to break it to you, but it’s going to affect your booklight, too.

predominantly white ones in the box. misers.

In other news, I’m horribly addicted to these hard, little, sea urchin-looking candy things from Pam’s trip to Japan. They’re essentially SUGAR. Just sugar with a smidgeon of flavour. The blue ones are the best: they taste like melon. Like, the fake melon taste you get with a lot of Japanese products, like a wide variety of their sweets and oh, Midori. The pink ones are cotton candy (whoo!) and the white ones are disappointingly nothing-flavoured. Just the sugar. Now and then you get a terrible vhoomph of mint from one of them, though.

Does anybody know what they’re called in Japanese or if they’re Googleable? The kanji on the front says “Jin Ping Tang” in Mandarin (so it’s wrong, because kanji’s Japanese, yes I get it), which translates to Golden Peace Candy in English. Or Golden Flat Candy, depending on the context. Of course I’m The Authority on All Things Chinese, so you’re just going to have to take my word for it.

my blog works again! many, many thanks to shortphat K who mailed and helped me out with some really geeky MySQL code, as well as a pretty quick and effective response from my host. it’s some auto increment thing. if you get it, you get it. i don’t entirely, so i won’t try and explain it, because it might make things worse.

hopefully this will be the last of my blog blues. (say that five times fast.) it also means that i don’t have to go ahead with the idea i was contemplating, of migrating over to an entirely new blog engine (textpattern?) and manually hand-importing my old entries in. phew.

just for dealing with the erratic outage, you guys get to see a super duper falluper exciting video of… a fire drill at the office. basically, it’s a bunch of people walking around, standing about waiting for it to be over, a kid asking his mother, “fire?” and someone sitting still filming the process—all except evacuating the building. enjoy the incessant ringing in the background too, which i sat through downstairs for a good 20 minutes.

later, an announcement went off (not recorded) to thank everyone for the successful fire drill. what? that’s not right. it was complete disaster, you idiots.

download firedrill.wmv