Leap year baby

If you are born on the 29th Feb, you get to celebrate your birthday only once every 4 years. Not a very common event! Waiting for the next celebration can be like waiting for the next Olympics or World Cup! Perhaps it can be an excuse for you to demand that your friends throw a party for you and make it special for you? Can you claim to be only 18 years old when you are already 76?

There are Chinese parents who consult feng shui experts to determine which is an auspicious date and time to deliver their baby. Medical advances now allow these parents to induce delivery or take out the baby via a surgical procedure. I had a colleague who made an appointment with her gynae to do a c-section at a certain date and time after consulting the experts. The ancient Chinese had believed that your fate is tied to your hour of birth and thus pay a lot of attention to the date and hour of a person's birth. Certain people are not favoured or even considered as jinxes due to their hour of birth. It is also believed that burial grounds influence the lives of a person's descendents but with real estate costs so high, this probably only applies to descendents who can afford to choose the burial grounds of his ancestors to benefit him. I suppose that it is much less expensive to choose the date and hour of birth. However, some people told me that selecting the delivery date artificially in this manner is "not accurate". Whatever.

I wonder if anybody chooses to be born on 29th Feb?

Where to find wireless@sg hotspots?

http://wireless.infocomm123.sg/ has a list of wireless@sg hotspots where you can get free wfi. Click on the "where to find wireless@sg" button.

Lovely, but how do you go online while you're out to find out where the nearest hotspot is? To avoid this stupidity, Thus there is also a program that you can download and bring with you on your PDA or smart phone. Click on the "Download offline wifi finder" and pick from the version that match your PDA or phone. For my Asus N311 PDA, I installed the version for Windows Mobile 5.0 PPC. No graphics, just text, but that should be enough for me.

It is said that some service providers may not work as well for you, maybe due to conflicts between your laptop/pda and their router. You will be able to see the operator from the list and maybe see which area to avoid. The site works with IE but not Firefox. No firefox?! It suddenly looks incredibly outdated. Fortunately the downloaded version saves me from ever having to open IE to come back to the site again.

Note, the data bundled with the software looks like it was last updated more than 6 months ago. So you should update the data after installation. You can do so from the menu, but you obviously need wifi or a phone with GPRS/3G. Library@Orchard(closed since Dec 07) is still in the downloaded list, but it vanished after the update.