“…nothing but the wild rain”.

"...nothing but the wild rain"

Was heading home from a friend’s solemnisation lunch last Saturday when a sudden downpour hit.

The skies had been grey for some time but I thought the clouds would hold.

They didn’t, and I unfortunately was forced to take shelter at the SMU building.

It was extremely miserable and frustrating because I could see the skies ahead were blue and clear but the clouds were covering the portion of town where I was at.

A geospatial visual (I’m the blue dot and I wanted to head north):

Pek chek is when you are the blue dot and you're heading north but you're prevented from doing so by the thin band of clouds that are as inconsiderate as drivers going at 50km/h in the right-most lane.

I think I’m getting a bit too old for this and I’m wondering if it’s time to add to the stable and get an OPC.

Teknologi, the enabler.

One of my fellow trainee teachers over here at Saint Gabriel’s also rides a motorcycle, so we are usually partners-in-crime in terms of rushing off just before the rain pours.

Our pet peeve is not being to get an early enough headstart because of the lack of a proper notification system. The current technology we use is Windows i.e. we look out of the window in the I & E room where we’re seated and guesstimate when it is we should leave.

Bad jokes aside, we also make use of the NEA’s Local Weather portion of the website quite a bit. But being the humans that we are, pulling the information from the website can be quite a hassle sometimes.

So what does one do? In an age where humanity’s kinship with that of electric currents has long been recognised (i.e. we follow the path of least resistance, LOL), ‘push’ technology comes into the picture.

Presenting to you, ladies and gentlemen, the Weather Widgets for the Mac OS X Dashboard!

The best part is: it didn’t require much technological know-how, just an awareness of Safari’s Web Clip feature in Leopard. For the real Windows users: no worries, there’s something in this for you too, cos I’m a very inclusive person 😛 You might wanna try this Singapore Rain Map Yahoo! Widget, or keep your eyes peeled for NEA to develop its RSS notifications, which you probably might be able to convert into an SMS notification… Somehow. But we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

Sian.

It’s kinda sian (dreary?) for me because the afternoon rains always seem to come just as I’m about to head back home. So I’ve been stuck at work until 5+pm for the last few days. As productive as I try to be, sometimes, there’s only so much a person can do before s/he has to take a break and recharge.

I hope the weather gets better over the next few days or something, but then again, maybe I should be finding alternative ways of getting home/going to school instead of letting the gloom get to me.