Merry Christmas 2013

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!

We also performed in church for Christmas:

Mama Mia! A new way to look at angklungs -- you won't Beat It!

The angklung is a traditional Malaysian/Indonesian folk instrument made from bamboo. You rattle it to make it make a sound, and need a whole bunch of them to make the different notes.

On Sunday 27 October 2013, a charity we support, TOUCH Community Services (of Selangor, not to be confused with another charity of the same name in Singapore) had their annual fundraising dinner and this talented brother and sister teenagers came and did this energetic performance of Abba's Mama Mia and Michael Jackson's Beat It on angklungs.

The angklung is a traditional Malaysian and Indonesian instrument made from bamboo. This teen brother and sister did an amazing job playing energetic pop songs using this ancient traditional instrument.

These talented teens, Jorinn Chee Ka-Yee (19 years old) and Gelvinn Chee Ka-Shing (16 years old), also played several songs from different cultures before I started recording, as well as performed magic acts and dances.

TOUCH Community Services in Selangor ministers to single mothers and their children in Kinrara Puchong (Harvest of Love) and Petaling Jaya (Naomi Connection), elderly (d'Happy Club), disabled (Shiloh House), and provides below-cost dialysis (Persatuan Dialisis Touch Petaling Jaya).

A day in the life of an exam invigilator...

I'm Chief Invigilator in the exams in the Grand Hall today. Half the hall were taking computer exams, while the other half were business students. As CI, I had to make a bunch of boring routine but important announcements about the exam rules. So to liven it up, I did a dramatic reading, compete with different accents and voices.

The computer students applauded.

One business student complained to an invigilator that he had high blood pressure and the excitement of my announcement required us to provide him with a drink to alleviate it!

To be fair, one or two business students did quietly privately express their appreciation. ☺

中秋节快乐！(Happy Mid-Autumn Festival)

Last Friday, Joni & Hannah's kindergarten organized a lantern walk. The girl in the centre is Joni's best friend from kindergarten, Samantha Quah.

10 years ago this Friday

I can hardly believe that this Friday will be our 10^th wedding anniversary! 10 years, 2 kids, and still in love ☺

Android script for moving RSSdemon podcasts to MortPlayer

I have an Android phone and use RSSdemon to download the podcasts I listen to. However, during playback of long podcasts, e.g. BBC Global News, if something interrupts the playback, e.g. an alarm goes off or Waze says “Turn right”, it will often lose its place and restart playing the podcast from the beginning!

Another app, MortPlayer Audio Books, does a very good job of keeping track of where you are in the podcast in spite of interruptions. However, MortPlayer does not download podcasts for you — you have to manually download the podcasts and put them in MortPlayer's directory.

At first, I thought to make MortPlayer look in RSSdemon's directory. However, RSSdemon stores the podcasts without the .mp3 extension, so MortPlayer does not recognize the files as audio files.

For this reason, I wrote this shell script which would move the files from the RSSdemon directory into the MortPlayer directory, and add the .mp3 extension. I can then tell MortPlayer to rescan and the new podcasts would be available.

---

#!/system/bin/sh

P_RSSDEMON=/storage/sdcard0/com.meecel.feedreader.RssDemonAd/cache/Podcast
P_MORTPLAYER=/storage/sdcard0/Music/Podcasts/RSS

P_DEST=$P_MORTPLAYER/`date +'%y%m%d'`

mkdir -p $P_DEST

cd $P_RSSDEMON

for i in * ; do mv $i $P_DEST/$i.mp3 ; done

---

You will need a script player app like SL4a to run the script. Change the P_RSSDEMON and P_MORTPLAYER directories to match your phone's directory structure. In particular, your phone might use sdcard or sdcard1 instead of sdcard0 as my phone does.

CNY photos from great-grandma's house

My cousin Yew Lynn sent me these photos she took of Joni and Hannah at my grandmother's house during our Chinese New Year visit (the reason the name for the album says "great-grandma" is because my grandma is my children's great-grandma.)

First, a cute photo of them in the house.

Then later, they had the opportunity to play with snap/pop firecrackers outside the house.

The snap-pop firecrackers left a big colourful mess on the floor....

... which Joni and Hannah helped sweep up! (Now, if we can convince them to do the housecleaning when they're older... ^‿^

Family Portrait

I've been posting a lot of photos of the children, but not many of us... partly it doesn't matter so much since we don't change in appearance so much as adults, but for those of you who haven't seen us for years, here's a recent family portrait, thanks to a photo session arranged by Juliane's brother Joshua.

2 lions invade children's playground!

Two ferocious Chinese lions invade the children's playground at the Giant Supermarket in Kinrara! ☺

Actually, this was a lion dance for a Chinese/Taoist blessing for the business.

Joni, Hannah and their friend Alyssa had fun that day. This video was taken by Alyssa's mother.