Just reached home from -- get this -- four hours of nonstop badminton. Two hours with people from work, the next two with people from HS. No plan of becoming an aspiring athlete, no worries. It's just that we happened to book the court from 6 to 8 and suddenly the other group told me they had booked another court in the same sports hall from 8 to 10. Oh, WTH, I thought.

Sorry, switching to Bahasa Indonesia for a paragraph...

Wiw, inget ya apa yang gua bilang: jangan terlalu percaya ama tulisan di blog. Contohnya di atas gitu. Gua tulis empat jam, padahal kenyataannya cuma tiga jam lebih dikit -- jam 6:20-an baru mulai, biasa deh, ada yang ora kelar-kelar -- baca di bawah -- trus itu juga nggak nonstop, gelombang kedua baru pada nongol 8:30-an, jadi sempet istirahat.

The day started early with me getting my first brush with Singapore law. Not bad for a guy who's been living here for almost seven years now. You ready for this?

I was caught jaywalking! Jay-friggin'-walking! On the spot where I almost always jaywalk nonetheless. Although, if this definition is anything to go by, I did not jaywalk -- since I was in no way endangered by traffic.

See the pic? The red footprints are mine, the blue are a young police officer's. Now, the green light was on, meaning that traffic along Paterson Road was moving. Meaning so were pedestrians crossing Orchard Boulevard. Meaning where I was crossing there was no traffic, save rare one or two cars from Paterson Road turning to Orchard Boulevard.

Meaning I was in no danger whatsoever.

The young police officer -- who had been hiding behind a big tree just to catch me, BTW -- politely ignored my protests, which, to be honest, were not that violent to begin with, and proceeded to write down my NRIC number.

"See the overhead crossing bridge there, sir? It's a bookable offense to cross the road when there's a crossing bridge nearby. The fine's twenty dollars, the summon will be sent to your registered address and you'll have a month to settle it."

Bookable offense, huh? So why don't you just show me a yellow card and be done with it? Anyway, rules are rules and I had just broken one. So I accepted my bad luck in silence. Whether the rule in question is stupid is another matter altogether, of course.

In other news, Oracle has lived up to its Ora Kelar-Kelar moniker yet again. Tasked with optimizing a certain process -- cut it from three hours to just under thirty minutes, boss says -- I have been trying various tips and tricks Google found for me. Some worked, some didn't -- just like other things in life.

BTW, here's one of the better tips.

Oh, and if you, like me, encounter this funky error -- hey, deja vu -- when using execute immediate, especially when the statement starts with begin:

...you might wanna pass the entire command as a single-line string. Use the concatenate operator if necessary, say, for readability.

On Monday and Tuesday I left the office after nine. Not overly good when it's only your third week at work. Well, at least the performance is finally improving. And today I had a good excuse to leave early (read: on time). It helped when you had your boss join you for a badminton session, of course.

All in all, not a bad day. And it's not over yet, Liverpool is playing West Ham in a few hours.

Can you say a long day?

Current music: Yellowcard - Lights and Sounds
Current mood: happy