Going into the (Dark) Cloud

What's your complain now Eka? Well last weekend I was badly stressed out that I didn't sleep and as such I had a bad headache on Saturday evening. I was popping pills in the span of like 3-4 hours which was okay according to the panadol that I was taking, but who knows? I am still here writing. It's all because on Friday morning my phone's screen couldn't light up. I switched it off in the hope that it just needed to be restarted, but then it refused to wake up. I waited again, took out the battery, waited, but it just couldn't start. The whole day I was basically not able to concentrate much and yet there were things that required my attention :( I had hope that perhaps it just needed to be charged but I also thought that it's time to get it replaced. So I quickly bought a new phone. Been using Nokia all my life and the strange me stick to a brand without reasonable logic. So I didn't browse around, I knew it would be Nokia again and I chose the cheapest Lumia out there. Simply because this is unplanned expenses and no I don't need fancy things. My old phone, E72, was great and many people didn't think it was smart, but it's smart for me. A lot of time a tool is only as great as the person wielding it. My old phone could be used to call, send texts, browse the Net, be an alarm clock, remind me of things to do and that's pretty much what I need.

Anyway the new phone Lumia 525 uses a micro sim and my dear sim card which has been in my possession since my early days in Singapore is not. Pause for a moment to reflect that I have been using the same sim card for close to 14 years. Anyway that was another arrrgghh moment for me. So gotta go to Singtel and asked for a micro sim with the same number. I had to pay S$ 38. Got home, tried to switch on my phone while charging it, it didn't work :'( Put the new sim card into the new phone, as expected no contacts data were there and in that moment it occurred to me that I only memorize 3 phone numbers in my head, my own, my house's phone and my aunt's house's number in Jakarta. Technology has rendered us useless without them. I was so stressed out. Try repeatedly to switch on the phone, sometime after waiting some time. One time it worked and I was so happy, but then it couldn't stay awake long enough for me to follow the instruction to transfer data through bluetooth and after it died, it just refused to wake up again. There was a time, it was awake and I carefully noted down the important information like some pin and password I stored there. Don't freak out, these are pin and password to non-important stuff and there's no identifier which pin and passwords these belong to, but yes it's still bad to do this. So anyway, this happened from Friday evening all the way to Sunday morning. I had one crappy weekend. Sunday morning after much praying, I managed to switch it on. I let it charge for a while, not sure if it's charging from the electric cable or the usb connection, either way I let it charge for a while and very carefully so as not to make sudden movement that could kill it, I did a back up through Nokia PC suite. It managed to stay awake long enough for it to complete. Praise God, Jesus, and the universe!

So then I had the backup but then there's no way to put it into the new phone. Both are Nokia but there's no instruction I could find to do this through the PC suite software. Maybe I didn't look hard enough. What I found were to install a software that could read the back up file and I did that. It was another glorious moment because I could see everything and export everything and I learn a new thing. The text messages lost its contact name, so there are just number. I guess that happens because I have activated the new sim in my new phone? However there were still the contacts intact, name and number matched. There were also other contacts which I think came because once I used msn messenger in my old phone. So all in all with the right software you could still dig in into what's inside your phones despite of the sim card being deactivated. Isn't it scary to think what can happen with your phone if it goes to the wrong hand? Anyways, we're not done. I have all that, how do I put it to the new phone. Lumia being a windows phone perhaps I should have explored the possibility of importing these contacts through my Microsoft account, but I didn't think much about it and just went to the first solution I found which was to transfer all the vcf files to Google and then link that Google account into the phone. After much struggle to format the combined data correctly, I made it happen ladies and gentlemen! I was super duper happy and relieved and felt really REALLY thankful to God. Now that I think about it, I am not sure that I could do the same through my outlook account. However for the rest, like some text files that contained the said important information like pin and password, I did in the end choose to use the sky drive. Linking this back to the title, everything is in the cloud now, which will make it easy for me the next time such unfortunate event happens to me again, but it also makes me uneasy about it. All those personal information. Someone somewhere just your typical IT guy could just get a hold of these things and then paste it on some web for the whole world to see like what have happened before that passwords of many people are appearing on the net. Your data don't seem so sacred anymore, that is the way of the world now. Who knows how many of my contacts have been syncing their phone to whatever Google or other accounts they have and my phone number and my name has been floating around somewhere in the cloud. It's funny to think that I often roll my eyes when I was told who and who are concerned about putting their data on the cloud and here I am right now feeling not so great myself about doing it. However I really don't see much choice in this moving forward, the technology starts to dictate us, not the other way around :(

So this new phone, well I miss my old phone. There are many things that I can find wrong with this new phone, the alarm will not work if the phone is shut down, there's no blinking light to tell me I have unread messages or a miss call and most annoying of all, this phone like all other "smart phones" requires charging like every 1.5 days. Seriously, I thought we should be more environmentally friendly? I hate this weakness a lot. So yeah, new phone, but I miss my old one dearly. The old phone was like more than 6 years old. I know this because I managed to find photos taken by it dated to 2008. So I guess it's just time for it to die and I am pretty proud of myself for being with it for so long and how awesome it has been serving me. I have grown so accustomed to it that it's hard to move to something completely different. Changes are always hard for me.

Change of topic. Went to Singapore Garden Festival yesterday. It's moving out of Suntec to Gardens by the Bay this year and as the years go, I found myself getting less and less mesmerized by it. I'm not sure if I will make visiting it a must the next time it happens. I guess many of it are like installation arts and that's always hard for me to think what I think about it. That's not to say that there aren't beautiful and interesting things. Also I have to say that whoever designed this in Gardens by the Bay are pretty awesome in erecting all the structures and making the path ways. Singapore is really good at doing this kinda thing.



As usual, there are also arrangements with recycled materials. Some were really smart.

This year there's the miniature garden sections and this one below got me excited because this is the green house in Harry Potter and you can see a bit of Professor Sprout there on the left. I guess those plants are real but they're so tiny. The whole display is like a small window, I think it's like only an A4 size window.

Outside was hot and there were things like this.

The most interesting part in the outdoor exhibition was the learning lab which features plants that give us food and medicine. I kinda stood around the guides who were explaining things to kindergarten kids to learn about some of the things :P Then I ended the day at the Flower dome where they are hosting the orchid sections of the festival.

It's a Tuesday and yet there were so many people and I felt really annoyed at having to queue. It's not the Gardens' fault, they did their job by controlling the crowd. This time the center walkway is accessible which is great, but the queuing was not. I had to queue twice, one for the walkway and then to go inside the orchid tower which made me feel super disappointed because the inside wasn't amazing at all. The display was small and I didn't think it's really really beautiful as what one of the volunteers said. For pictures from this festival, you can go here.

I ended yesterday by watching The Expendables 3. It was okay I guess. However Sylvester Stallone in scenes with people like Mel Gibson and Antonio Banderas just kinda show how much better they are at acting than he is. They were really good. Then I got really confused with Jet Li. He always gets top billing for this movie but aside from the first one he only appeared a little bit and didn't really do much action. Did they put him in just because of the Chinese market? Anyway funny how I found the first one to be kinda boring and yet I kept on coming back for the sequels and so far they kinda grew on me :D I have to say by they I don't mean the young kids. The Expendables should just stick to their old fashion action because it's where their draw is. Alrighty, that's about it from me. Hopefully in the next post I won't be complaining about much stuff again.

:) eKa @ 8:58:00 PM •

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