Category Archives: Personal Life

Games, Personal Life

What I’ve Been Up To (Part 1)…

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I’ve gotten my Streamyx service up and running, so hopefully I can be online more now. To start with, this is what I’ve been gaming with for the past month. Since I expected to be in Malaysia on holiday for only a month, I knew it wasn’t feasible to bring back my main gaming PC all the way from the Solomon Islands. So in order not to become bored silly while on holiday, I bought a PSP. As my wife will readily attest, I’ve been making noises about buying one ever since it launched, but the higher price and the limited games library available then didn’t make it seem like a good buy until now.

The really funny thing is that while I originally intended to buy the PSP to play “deep” games that I’ve heard so much about, such as Monster Hunter and Armored Core: Formula Front, I actually ended up spending most of my time on it on more arcade-style action games like God of War, Wipeout Pulse and Tekken: Dark Ressurection. I have to admit that between the handheld format and the clunky English translations (and the severe lack of them in many places) I just couldn’t summon up enough enthusiasm to really understand how the deeper games work.

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Personal Life

Out of a Job

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As I anticipated, I’m now out of a job. To simplify a complicated situation, the company I was working for in the Solomon Islands has been experiencing financial difficulty for the past two years. More ominously, for the past two months, expatriate employees going back to Malaysia for their annual leave have not been receiving their full salary payment before being asked to return to work in the Solomon Islands.

As the person holding the title of Financial Controller in the company, though without much the power that the title holds since I’m not a relative of the big boss, unlike many of the other managers there, I have been keenly disturbed by this and worried that the powers-that-be have not been willing to take the harsh measures necessary to return the company to a profitable status. Even before I left the Solomon Islands, I insisted that I would refuse to work unless I was paid in full. After some nasty telephone calls, I have now been fully paid and also instructed that I won’t need to return to work.

Don’t feel too bad for me though, since my wife and I have been planning to leave the company after just one more year of working there anyway. This just means that we’ll need to readjust to life in Malaysia one year earlier with a bit less money than we’d planned. I’m planning to take things easy for a while. Now that I think about it,I’ve been working outside Malaysia for nearly 10 years now, and even that was after just a year of working in Malaysia after spending nearly 3 years in France. After all this time spent overseas, readjusting to life will take some doing. Not only will I need to look for a job, I’ll actually need to buy a car, learn how to drive in the hectic streets of Kuala Lumpur (very different from the leisurely pace in Honiara) and yes, even set up some sort of broadband connection where I’m staying. Just about everything here is new to me!

Once my net access is up and running, I should be able to work on updating this blog on a more regular basis, beginning with some fun stuff that I’ve been up to during the past month.

Personal Life

Hiatus

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I am travelling to Malaysia on Thursday and currently expect to spend one month there. Since my Internet access during this time will likely be intermittent, I will most probably not be able to update this blog very often.

Personal Life

Local Houses in Solomon Islands

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My wife got me to drive one of the local maids employed in the compound where we live so that we could go take photos of some of the local houses. We’ve already visited this area previously but we didn’t take any photos then, and since there is a slight possibility that we might not be returning to the Solomon Islands after we go back to Malaysia on Thursday, my wife especially wanted some photos as a memento.

This particular house is where Helen, a maid who has worked for us for many years now is currently renting. She is currently building her own house nearby, basically just appropriating the land without any formal paperwork, buying the building materials and having her family members help out with the construction. It’s haphazard, unregulated and messy, but that’s how things work in the Solomon Islands. It also contributes to the tribal tensions here in Honiara. Honiara is located on Guadalcanal Island, while Helen and everyone else who stays in this area are from Malaita Island. Complaints from Guales about Malaitans taking over their land and their attempts to form a militia to drive out the Malaitans were what prompted the Malaitans to mount a coup-d’état in 2000.

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Personal Life

U.S. War Memorial in Solomon Islands

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My wife and I visited the U.S. War Memorial here in Honiara over the weekend. We’ve been here plenty of times already but we didn’t take any photos. Guadalcanal Island was a major battleground of the Pacific theatre during World War 2, with many losses on both the American and Japanese side, so it’s not surprising that there is a well maintained memorial here. The U.S. military makes regular visits to the Solomon Islands, sending personnel and fighter jets in honour of their war dead. The film The Thin Red Line is based on the Guadalcanal campaign and is worth watching if you can put up with its 3 hours running length.

The U.S. Memorial is located along Skyline Ridge, on a hilltop that overlooks Honiara, so it’s a rather pleasant and scenic place to visit. The memorial itself is simply a collection of marble slabs with details descriptions of the battles and lists of losses. They make for good reading if you’re interested in World War 2 history, though in the case you should probably go read the Wikipedia entry on the subject instead.

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Films & Television, Personal Life

Classic French Songs

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My wife and I have been watching the first season of Lost (yes, we’re slow) and one of the episodes featured a classic French song, La Mer by Charles Trenet and after that I just had to search Youtube for the full version of it. In fact, we’d recently spent one evening searching for classic French songs after learning of the surprise win by Marion Cotillard of the Best Actress award for her role in La Vie en Rose, so I thought it would be nice to write a post of some of the songs we found.

When studying the French language at the Centre de Linguistic Appliquée in Besançon, one of the exercises we were given was to transcribe the lyrics of French songs, beginning with nursery rhymes and moving on to classic songs and more modern pop music, which was how I learned about many of these songs. I’d actually guess that most English speakers in Malaysia would actually have heard of them in one form or another, only most won’t know their titles and singers, so here they are.

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Personal Life

A Day at the Museum

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Considering the size of the Solomon Islands National Museum, it’s really more like 15 minutes though. I have to admit that despite having worked in the Solomon Islands for some 8 years now and despite it being located conveniently in the town center just off the main road, I’ve never visited the National Museum. Not that there is really much to see. You can see the entirety of it in the photo above with my wife. That small hall constitutes the entire museum, so it’s pretty underwhelming.

The exhibits are mostly wooden carvings and examples of shell money, bundles of sea shells tied together that used to be exchanged as currency and are still given as marriage gifts in some communities. There are also some old photographs of some of the early explorers who came to the Solomons.

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