Shakeup And Breakup

At The Workplace

Like any other day, I would normally turn on my PC in the office and get on with the daily rituals of emails, charts and analysis.

Like some days, the Windows Live Messenger would not let me sign-in because of heavy traffic or some form of server maintenance.

Email was fine, so most of the correspondences were done without a hitch. More, so when there are actually not many emails flying about because of this festive season. All was great.

Still it was strange how sluggish surfing the Internet was felt, with some US sites with "...not able to be displayed" messages. Some colleagues from the next building were not able to surf the net at all!

Hmm... never really thought much of it until someone told that our local Internet Provider was declaring disruptions to their overseas lines, but did not indicate the reason why as they were still investigating... major virus attack?

The Taiwan earthquake? Could not be... maybe? Hmm...

Blogging was not possible at lunch time today, so I had to push it till I got home.

At My Den

Still, tonight... Blogger was "down" or sometimes too sluggish to display the Dashboard Page after signing-in. Blogger was not responding well and neither was my iTunes all my favourite radio stations!

The two most important past-time rituals was not to be tonight, when my writing urge was over-flowing in me. I had to resort to writing it first in my PC Notepad and transfer it to Blogger once the Internet was good again.

"Ayah! Come here and look at the TV screen!" My son shouted out from the living room excitedly.

The Hallmark cable channel was displaying a white screen with a message announcing that the channel is experiencing disruption due to the Taiwan earthquake!

Wow, only then that the pieces fall into place.

Channel News Asian or CNA reported that most part of East Asia are affected by the Taiwan earthquake. The undersea cable was damaged which led to the virtual blackout of the information superhighway from East Asia to the US.

All efforts were under way to reroute the Internet line via Europe instead, while they had to repair the cable, which would take several weeks.

Home surfer like me have no qualms with such inconvenience due to natural disasters like this. I am glad that this is the only "damage" we sustain here, unlike south of Taiwan where the earthquake epicentre was trashing them out of their homes on Boxing Day with a 7.1 Richter scale shake.

The Insignificant Us

The saddest part is when this natural occurrence coincided exactly on the same day the earthquake hit Indonesia resulting in the 2005 Tsunami that killed 220,000 people across many coastal regions.

Ironic it seems, as they were mourning for the tragedy, it struck again. This time a tsunami alert was sounded, but fortunately none occurred.

All this amid the monsoon rain that has flooded many parts of Malaysia and Indonesia and displaced more than 60,000 and 990,000 people in these countries respectively.

We in Singapore could only donate and help-out as volunteers to assist local Mercy Relief, Red Cross and other charitable organisations here rushing to provide humanitarian aids to these affected locations.

Another devastating earthquake occurrence could very well cripple the already slow recovery rate these area are experiencing from the 2005 Tsunami.

Praying For Peace

Praying hard that year 2006 will end with the human spirit triumphant... prevailing and uniting amid the calamities, when we help one another across borders and oceans instead of being lost in greed and destroying one another during good times.

I finally got through to Blogger almost midnight. Phew!

Thought I wrote this post instead... LASIK surgery can wait.