Adventures indaddy land: day 4

Happy to note that j3 continues to improve and should be able to go scholl tomorrow after a week of being sick. With the mom 's advice, i called to cancel her appointment with her paed as it's just a waste of the prof's time to see a kid who's on the mend.

j1 had trouble waking up for school not as much as lack of sleep but having boy trouble at school. Ahem, not what you think, but she's got a couple of boys who keeps giving her a hard time and she, being the princess that she is, is unable to cope with the attention.

J2 is her usual self but did not make it to her swimming as it was threatening to rain with thunder and lightning. But true to form, the second she got to the apartment, there were no morw thunder and lightning!

And i have some work that requires my attention in the coming days so will be kep busy with that.

And this is turning out to be an uneventful day.

Sent from my Nokia phone

adventures in daddy land: day 3

Day 3, a sunday turned out to be quite nice.

j3's fever had subsided, and she's back to her cheeky old self. She only needed a dose of fhamol all day, but her sniffles and cough are still quite bad.

J1 finally got down to doing some of her homework and in addition we gave her some additional work to do in english and math. We have found that her math linguistic skills are not up to par and she has some trouble undertanding written questions.

J2 was being her usual self. She had helped make breakfast of scrambleb eggs and toast. She also did some drawing though bot so much work sheets. Need to give her more work sheets to do to encourage her to be diligent in her work.

We stayed at home, more for j3's fever and the kids got out to play by the lobby instead og going down to the playground.

There was a will smith show on tonight but decided to reward the kids by allowing them to watch high school musical during dinner time. As a plan we will be watching high school musical 2 tomorrow after dinner, if they behaved themselves.

J3 hadn't slept all day, so she took a short nap at 7 pm only to wake up in a bout of cough. J2 also did not nap was asleep by 9 pm and j1 should be going to sleep soon.

mommy was on skype with them for 2+ hours, so they had mommy there with them. J2 is still suffering from mommy withdrawal although she seems to be adjusting nicely.

All in all a good day, and plus i managed to get some work done as well!

Till tomorrow, the journal continues.

Sent from my Nokia phone

Adventures in daddyland: day 2

Surpringly quiet. j3 was still running a temp for most of the day but the good part is that she's getting her cheekiness back.

The girls skyped with the mom, and naturally j2 was all tears and having a really shitty time being apart from her mom. The other 2 was just taking it in their stride.

Then the sleep monster overcame me and i crashed for a couple of hours, waking in time to take j1 to her swimming lesson and then off to Lizzie's wedding.

I got a call from home asking to feed j3 her brufen as her temp had by 8 pm soared back to upper 38, so told my mom to go ahead to do that and then it was quiet for the rest of the night.

I had a ball catching up with ex-colleagues and the food was good (kudos to Lizzie's ma-in-law).

By the time i got back was close to midnight and the girls were all asleep, and so ended day 2 of my adventure and thankfully not as manic as day 1.

Sent from my Nokia phone

Adventures in daddyland: day 1

Yesterday marked the 1st day i was a dad at home with 3 kids as the mom is away for her work training for 6 months.

Of course, i am not completely home alone but with the benefits of a 3 generation family under one roof with a maid to boot.

I will have 6 weeks on my own at which time i hope to have all the kids' digits intact, then we're off to be with the mom for 9 weeks and then back again alone for another 6 weeks.

On top of that i have to contend with work.

So yesterday chronicled my 1st day.

It was relatively uneventful. I was in front of the enotebook most of the day, unfixing a boo boo i did when i tried to install ubuntu onto it. Had to do a complete reformat and reinstall.

J1 was at home from school, and was tasked to finish her homework as well as some test papers to test her readiness to sit for the exams on the coming weeks.

J2 was sent to school by myself as she had a late night sending the mom off at the airport.

J3 was still suffering from fever and the cough and sniffles she caught from me since monday. her temp was consistenly above 38 and 39, so we had to supp her to try to keep her fever down at mid-day. That worked for a few hours and by early evening, her temp had spiked again.

I checked and her temp reading said 40.5 deg c. So instead of trying to get her to see her paed on monday, my mom and i made a beeline to the children's emergency.

luckily it was not a full house, and we were seen in relatively short time. J3 was misreable by then and the sight of unfamiliar docs made her even more misreable. Luckily the MO on duty pull up some mulan on youtube and that placated her some.

3 hours, 1 blood test, 1 xr and 2 doses of brufen later we finally left emergency.

The mom had a long distance chat with the consultant or reg on duty and she's happy that the tests came back normal.

So much for a low-key kick-off, and instead we got all the excitement.

Hopefully day 2 would be more relaxing.

Sent from my Nokia phone

A case of out of the frying pan and into boiling water.

My notebook running vista had just given me the blue screen. It was reliably giving the blue screen on a daily basis for the past week!

So today i decided to take the plunge to install ubuntu and hopefully no more blue screen.

Well was i wrong! I set out to have it dual boot, but ended up only being able to boot in ubuntu. My limited knowledge of linux and ubuntu did not help, but i like the UI, and hopefully the stability.

Luckily i backed up my key files, and am prepared to spalsh money on xp home, but i feel a need to solve the problem or give it a whack first. Call it the engineer in me, (or a sucker).

Am enlisting a friend's help but for now will have to work on the desktop while i figure out the notebook problem.

Talk about jumping out of the frying pan and into the pot!

Sent from my Nokia phone

So that's how it feels like

I am sad. I am upset. I am angry. most of all I am disappointed.

Why am I feeling so? It because I have roundly and soundly been stabbed in the back by someone I thought I was helping.

Case in point: I prepared a document for him,a spent close to 2 full days (on my own cost), sent it to him to review; and today news filtered back to me that my version was the outdated version.

It was not like there was no opportunity to send me an updated document, in fact we had spoken many time on the phone. he had the chance to review and rebut the information in the document but he decided to keep it from me, and make me look like a fool in front someone whom I had said I've pre-qualified the project.

All the pro-bono work was for nothing. I am damn angry, in fact I have not felt this level of rage in a long time. And I thought I was doing my best to help him.

in making me look bad, I think he has done himself a further disservice. because he has made himself to be a person who is untrustworthy, or worse; a person living in his own little world.

Now I know how it feels like to have a knife shoved and twisted into one back. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and this is one of them. And I'm unsure if I am magnamacious enough to let it slide. I want revenge, I want payback.

Lord, please help me be strong in the face of such adversity and stupidity.

Sent from my Nokia phone

Cool!

I was listening to my download of jazztrax when I saw this and thought it was simply beautiful.

Wouldn't you agree?

Sent from my Nokia phone

My future

In a short span of 24 hours, the first or many decisions will be made by others that will impact my future.

There will be a meeting a skeptical entrepreneur and an unorthodox investor where they have a meeting and decide if they both want to jump into bed together on a project.

I put that project to my partners who then worked behind the scenes to set the ball rolling.

The stakes are high, and the returns potentially lucrative.

but that tentative first step may be the hardest because the entrepreneur has been screwed over by too many people to be an optimist, whereas the investor is unorthodox to say the least.

Within the next 24 hours we shall see if my project and indirectly my firm will be able to survive.

Let keep our fingers and toes crossed.

Sent from my Nokia phone

Part 2 - Water Investment

Some may say that I am one of those who follow the herd mentality.

The Cleantech Group has just finished their investment forum on Cleantech, and there was a discussion on Water investment, so I can safely say that I am not alone in this thinking. In fact, this is a well known fact for the past 20 years or so.

A lot of pundits are saying that Water will be the next oil. UNlike oil where there can be substitute to energy, human rely on water to survive. Man (or woman) can survive with minimal use of energy such as coal and oil (just live like caveman of the past), but we cannot survive without water. You could say it is the elixir of life. THe lack of water will not only cause huma suffering but it will also cause social unrest, and thus potentially leading to antagonistic attacks on neighbouring countries in order to have that access to fresh water.

Singapore has accutely felt this fact since day 1 of independence, when Malaysia used water as a leverage in its dealings with Singapore during its short time as part of Malaysia.

So naturally, Singapore can be considered the Oasis in water technology, as the government has sought to be independent from Malaysia in terms of the citizen's water needs. It has desalination plants, as well as the Newater, which is essentially is recycled water.

So where would I look for in terms of water investment? I'd say 2 or 3 major themes.

1) Low energy desalination or filtration.

Technologies that will take salt water (in abundance) and convert them into fresh potable water. Based on the traditional way of desalinating salt water is to boil the water, extract the salts and then allow the water vapor to condense back into water, sans the salt and other minerals.

However, this is energy inefficient. THe latest technologies include reverse osmosis (RO) membrane technology. Hyflux, a Singapore based company is a prime example of a listed company taking advantage of the need for access to clean water to grow its business.

THe key would be to push these technologies into more energy efficient processes, or to take an out of the box approach in desalination.

2) Recycling water.

When Singapore started bottling Newater for the public to have their first taste of recycled water, much was made of it; and some in not so nice terms, ie jokes like drinking pee etc etc.

However, the asronauts have been doing that since the spacelabs days as it is important under those circumstances to be able to bring a bare minimum amount of fresh water from earth and then depend on what can be recycled to sustain the astronauts in space.

Again, recycling water uses a variety of membrane technology as well as charcoal scrubbers.

There are some innovative technologies like Katadyn and Hydration Technologies, that provide solutions that require no power (except human power) to provide the clean water for the users. These are mainly driven by the need for military personel to have access to clean water irrespective of their location as long as they have access to a river or pond for fresh water.

The opportunities here are then to look for key enablers that can lower the cost of adoption. Or to be able expand the volumetric flow of the membranes to something a village could use, but continue to be human operated. Or perhaps to expand the life of the membranes.

3) Irrigation and piping.

I believe this is one of the most wasteful loss, which can be controlled. 

A lot of pipes in Malaysia are old and the infrastructure is crumbling, thus leading to flow loss that could otherwise be recovered and used by the users.

Perhaps the next innovation could be how to monitor leaky pipes deep underground. The current use of ground microphones are limited to the area of coverage. What is needed is a grid monitoring system akin to the electrical grid system to detect unusual activities within the water grid, ie higher than usual flow of water etc. This is an interesting article about detction of water leakage.

No I believe the next innovation to come out would be in the area of leak detection as there are current major efforts to improve the membrane technology for the filtration of water.

Next, agrotechnology.

The next thing in investment.

If I were running a venture fund right now, I'd be looking at 3 major themes, and I have been consistent at sticking to these themes:
1. Energy
2. Water
3. Food or I'd call it agrotech

Now anyone not in a comatose would have known that billions of dollars of investment has been pumped into cleantech, so I kinda believe the whole sector is tapped out.

Potentially the bright spots are technologies that improve upon existing solutions, ie the race for better efficiency in solar is never ending, and so is the race to make cells and panels cheaper.

We have also seen a lot of investment into smart grid technology, and perhaps a movement into electricity on demand like if a domicile has its own source it is able to better regulate its own use, and also be able to sell any excess to the grid.

The other area is how to make wind more ubiquitous? There are areas where current wind technology does not work due to inconsistent or low wind speeds. I read the other day that a company was just funded to commercialize their gear technology to reduce energy loss via mechanical means.

Similarly to wind, how about underwater current (as opposed to the current wave technology). However of key would be concerns of environmental impact to oceanic life.

And for many company's in the area of energy, the race is now building up generating capacity, be it via plants or solar farms or wind farms.

I am hopeful that within the next 5 years we will start to reap the benefits of such technology in our daily life.

Next installment will be my thoughts on water technologies.

Sent from my Nokia phone