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Diary

Uff! Massive Jam!

A doodle inspired by traffic jam

I remember vividly the first time I saw the words “Massive Jam” lit up on the highway signboard.  I was driving on the northbound CTE (in Singapore), on a rainy evening, quite a number of years ago.  One tree fell onto the highway that forced all the vehicles to exit at Ang Mo Kio.  Imagine four or five lanes of traffic squeezed into one exit.  Not pretty.  And since then, no jam felt as massive as that mother of all massive jam.  At times I try my luck, enter the highway despite seeing the “Massive Jam” warning sign and it turns out to be just another heavy traffic condition.  Nothing massive.  At times, it is like yesterday morning, when I have to spend more than an hour covering perhaps 10 km on the CTE highway.

2 incidents in 2 different segments of the highway.  I suppose it must be pretty major judging at the amount of debris on the road (no pool of blood, thank God).  One time, I was inside a lift and one foreigner said to another foreigner after showing him a – I suppose – gruesome image of an accident using his phone, “I wonder why such a small island can have so many road accidents.”

I too wonder why.

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Diary From the Attic

The Mount of Java

Three distinct incidents happened today and I have chosen the most significant one to be the title of today’s diary.  One is on feeling, the other two are something that is within my control and something not.

Throughout the day, I have been disappointed by the lack of reaction from the folks in the office about the signoff of our functional specification.  It is as though nothing has happened!  Ridiculous.  How can it be?  Over time, there is nothing but bad news in Aretae – project teams cannot meet deadline and hence do not get to secure the payments.  This time, the NUS project team has made it and managed to secure the payment even before the deadline.  Sometimes, I am puzzled in how the company is run.

Throughout the day, I have learnt and experimented on how to program JSP and Servlet and I have created one semi-working function.  My first time with Java and it is like facing yet another challenge with yet another programming language.

These two events are that feeling of mine and that something that is within my control.  As for the third event, it is something to do with the weather and the traffic.  Traffic jam in CTE has been consistently terrible.  One of the worse jam I have experienced was during one of the World Cup semi-finals.  One of the most bizarre jam I have experienced has got to be today’s jam.  All the way from the second tunnel, the cars were crawling.  At first I thought it was the bad weather, then after seeing one of the van broke down in the middle of the highway, I thought to myself, “That must be it!”  Then, I noticed that the traffic police have cut off the highway from AMK Avenue 1 onwards.  That was bizarre.  Maybe they are installing another speed camera after Avenue 5.

Physical: 0.27
Emotional: -0.78
Mental: 0.10