We are users of cellphones, mobile phones, handphones or whatever you want to call them. We’re used to being able to change plans spontaneously because it’s easy to tell the other person anytime what the new plan is. So it’s hard for us to go back to making plans in situations where we don’t both have a phone.

And right now, we don’t both have a phone.

On Sunday, that left me waiting at the arranged time and place for a long time.

It wasn’t really raining. That would have made it worse. But it was a gloomy evening, all the same.

Aquinas had a long day. When I went to bed on Thursday, he was still awake, talking about grading papers. When I woke up on Friday and went to meet a friend for lunch, he wasn’t in the house; I assumed he’d gone to some 24-hour cafe to grade and hadn’t come back yet, but would return home soon and shower and sleep. But when I came back from work on Friday evening, it seemed he had never returned or showered or slept. And because he didn’t have a phone, I couldn’t call him.

Uh oh.

I sent a Skype message, but no response. I waited a while, wondering whether I should start asking colleagues of his whether they’d seen him, and how to even begin to start to go about trying to do that. I tried not to worry. This is Singapore, not Chicago or New York; chances are he wasn’t lying in a gutter in an alley sans not only phone but also wallet.

Then he came home and everything was okay again. Except that he was really tired.

I launched the blog on 5 May (even though the first battle was said to be on 4 May). On 6 May I had to debug the way images were uploaded and displayed.

I wanted to upload raw images from the camera at full size (so they’ll be archived on the server if I want them later) and then have WordPress automatically create images of a size appropriate for the posts. I thought the CMS was already set up to do this. But no.

It wasn’t working. Some of the images wouldn’t upload: WP just gave me a broken image icon. Others would upload but not resize to the three built-in sizes.

I determined that there must be a memory limit problem. My server’s PHP just didn’t want to resize raw images from the camera that were thousands of pixels across and 5MB each. WP says the upload size limit is 7MB, but apparently problems happen even with files that are smaller than that.

I toyed with the idea of trying to increase my PHP memory limit, but in the end just gave in and resized the raw files down to 2000 pixels across. Then I started seeing three sizes generated automatically.

The problem wasn’t solved, though. I thought I was picking the auto-generated size to display in the post, the image that stretches across the full width of the post content div. But WP was displaying an even bigger image and resizing it in HTML to the width of the post. I was not going to stand for that. Resizing in HTML from 1024 to 604 is just stupid.

Eventually I realized that the auto-generated images I thought I was picking to display in the posts were a size that the theme uses for “featured images”. Those images have the tops and bottoms of my images cropped out. I was seeing the width dimension of those images and assuming the height was what I wanted. WP was assuming I wanted my large not-cropped image resized to the post width via HTML because nowhere was I actually telling WP that I wanted my upload resaved at that size.

The solution was to register a new custom image size, and tell WP that I wanted the size to be selectable in the image menus. So, two code snippets later, everything was working just as I wanted it to.

You think WordPress is a turn-key system? Think again…

Computers don’t do what you want. They do what you tell them. So tell them what you want very carefully.

I’m an Ang Moh. Literally, in Hokkien, it means I am a “red-hair”. A Western foreigner. I eat bread (not rice exclusively). And potatoes. So sue me.

There’s lots of bread in Singapore. Lots of bakeries. But many of them just sell fluffy bread. Most of the people running them have probably never heard of sourdough.

There are some bakeries that sell actual Western bread, with like, you know, proper crust and everything. And sometimes restaurants are bakery/cafe combinations.

Today I ate at a bakery/cafe called Kitchenette, which calls itself “French Inspired”. The food was good! Can’t go wrong with breakfast all day…

Unfortunately, Kitchenette’s sourdough loaves and baguettes aren’t as good as I was hoping. Sigh.

Monday is currently not a working day for me. While Aquinas was out of the house, I moved a bunch of stuff out of the spare room. This left a lot of free floor space. Then I brought in the stepladder to access the jammed window shade chain. I couldn’t fix it.

Aquinas was surprised to see boxes and swathed picture frames in the entryway, but recovered quickly and set to work on the problem of the jammed window shade.

He managed to extract the plastic chain itself and roll down the shade. Lowering the shade was, admittedly, the primary goal. Ideally, though, the chain would control the up and down movement of the shade. Now it controls nothing. We have no idea how to insert it into the place where it belongs.

I call this a draw.

I read Donald Norman’s book The Design of Everyday Things. One of his pet peeves is doors. Some doors go both ways but specifically only say “pull” or “push” on their labels. Some doors look like they are pushable but can only be pulled, or vice versa.

I read Steve Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think, which says website user interfaces should not need instructions, nor should features be self-explanatory. They should be self-evident.

Well, the Citibank ATMs at Parkway Parade have gone from good design to worse design, as far as I’m concerned. They used to be the kind where you dip your card and immediately take it out and put it back wherever it came from. Now they are the kind where you put your card in and leave it. You do your business, and you collect your card at the very end of the transaction, after you collect your receipt. The machine beeps at you if you don’t take your card from the slot.

I thought the beeping (and the general intuition that I need my card back) would be enough. But no. There’s a reason most ATMs give you your card and THEN your cash: Once you’ve got your cash, there’s no real reason for you to hang around.

Many times since the change in design and operating procedures, I remembered and took my card back. Until one day, 4th May 2014.

I was, in Singaporean parlance, too “blur” to remember to take my card from the dip slot. And, since the mall is noisy, I guess I didn’t hear the ATM beeping at me. So I left the card there. Now they have to mail me a new one. And I have to wait for it.

Dozens and dozens, perhaps hundreds, of transactions with that card in the past two, no—no, five!—years were successful and unproblematic. Until Sunday 4th May.

Yes, it was my fault, but it was theirs, too. Thanks a lot, Citibank, for making your Parkway Parade ATM less usable.

The tyrannosaurus and the triceratops represent different things. They enact our struggles, big and small, and help us keep a sense of humor and perspective. The sketchbook and this website are an archive of these battles. Read the about page for more background.