Book Worm

Dear M n M,

Feeling very guilty for not having the time to take March and Matt on a break, this being Matt’s summer holiday.

The new job is literally consuming all of my time, and soon I’ll be away for a week!

Your mother has patience of a saint, soon things should get better.

Anyway, to keep you occupied she has been taking you to TK park, the best way to describe it would be, library on steroid.

It has a brilliant kids section, as well as a good computer area, so Matt was in his environment, reading seems to be his fav past time :)

There is this photo booth that takes a snap shot of visitors then you can just send it to your email address.

Just imagine, me slaving away and suddenly this pic popped up in the personal mail box… I couldn’t have a bigger smile on my face.

As TK Park is very close to the office, how can I keep myself for coming to see you? :)

This evening as soon as I got back home, Matt was already tucked up in bed. As soon as I walked in he turned around and said, “I love you Papa, how was your day Papa, did you have a good day?” Well all my trouble just melted away. “I am fine baby :)”

Also every morning, Matt has decided to walk me to the elevator, “I love you Papa, have a good day Papa, see you soon” WOW :) <3

Good start :)

Dear M and M,

There is nothing like a kick in the face in the morning :) oh, just kidding.

Whenever Matt walks in the room Little Marcella eyes will always follow him, yearning for him to come over and play :)

Quite out of the blue and quite often, Matt would walk up to Marcella and whisper “I Love you Marcella, I will take care of you Marcella”, can you just imagine the look on your mother’s face when she heard that? Priceless :)

Let’s go out :)

Dear Marcella,

We think you are taking after your brother, as soon as we put you into the pram you face would be full of anticipation, wide-eyed and smiling. All of us were up quite early, so we (your mother) decided to head off to ‘The Circle’, it’s one of those lifestyle mall, all open air and arranged like you are walking in a small village.

Seeing how you enjoy going outside so much, I am going to put my foot down now, curfew time for you will be 7pm every night until you are 35 years old, lol. Ok 30 years old.

This photo was taken in a restaurant, you have just had your second cracker, oh, and how you love your crackers. As soon as you started moaning all we had to do is give you a cracker, silent mode for the next ten minutes :)

Like I said before, you are such a smiler. I am going to be away for the whole of next week, and I am going to miss you and Matt terribly :)

Me and You :)

Dear M & M,

We were bored and your mother wanted to be out of the house, so we decided to visit a close by Japanese restaurant, which we have forever been driving passed for the past year or so. (Well when I say ‘we decided’ I meant ‘your mother decided :)

As this was Mother’s day weekend the place was jam packed, through pure luck we managed to get a room just for the four of us :)

Not the cheapest place in the world, but the food was excellent as well as the service, and the best thing was forty percent discount :) that we didn’t even realised they were running.

Well the most important thing was that your mum had a good time :) and as you two get older you’ll realise that keeping your mother happy is mandatory, haa haa haa.

Itchy elbow :)

Dear Matt,

Your cast’s life ended a week ago, to tell you the truth, I don’t think it helped :) at the end of the two weeks you were constantly moaning about your itchy elbow :) and did your very best to get deep within the cast.

Anyway, I am sure you were happy to be rid of the cast, and I think the cast was definitely more happy to be rid of you, haa haa haa.

The Dr. said the fracture is still there but smaller now. You are able to straighten your arm a little more each day, hopefully by the end of the month you’ll be back to normal.

As you can see, cast or no cast, you still play to the max, lol. You definitely ran out of petrol this time my boy :) The colour of the photo still looks funny once transferred into WLW, can’t be bothered to look into it at the moment :) though.

Following me :)

Dear Marcella,

You gave me such a boost a couple of days ago. When I left the apartment to leave for work, I heard this sound following me. It was you all smiling and scuttling along in your bright red walking chair, you were alone :)

You followed me until I was at the elevator, when I walked towards you, you gave me a huge smile and stuck out your arms for me to lift you up. How could I have resisted, of course I didn’t :)

I can not believe you are 9 months old! Where did the time go? Perhaps I’ll win the lottery this time round, so I can stay home all day to play with you, haa haa haa.

Make flying more convenient?

I am fortunate to have been given opportunities to work in vastly different field, from Automotive Industry (Dealer Network Development), lifestyle business (Food and Beverage), dipped my toe in the Car Rental world, and now for the present, Aviation Solutions. I must admit, this is by far the biggest learning curve for me, because unlike the past, I am not here to start the business unit, I’ve been asked to join an existing operation, with great people who has true determination.

As a part of getting to know the field, I’d decided to take a look at the duopoly in Boeing and Airbus, and as usual got side tracked into the future of air travel on Airbus’ website. They were overflowing with ideas, from pre-loading the travellers into appropriate seats, then load the whole floor into the plane (just like baggage in the ULDs), to plane stations not unlike the undergrounds.

Many of their ideas would require huge infrastructure changes, and for a novice like me, can not see it happening in the next 3 generations that is our children’s children’s children’s life time :) So here is the question, how to make air travel more convenient within the next 10 years.

Logically, it is more than just time taking to board a plane. If we are to discuss this logically we really should consider our very first step that we take from our homes as the overall convenient of air travel, and considering many developing countries perhaps having only one or two international airports, that basically throws the ‘convenient’ part out of a window of a very, very high building.

Yellow Brick Road

How do I get to the airport? I do live in the capital city of a developing country, admittedly our country is probably more developed than many on the same list. The most convenient would be (ranking from the most to the least), self drive (if you can stand the traffic), Taxi (if you can get them), BTS (aka Sky train, but this for many means getting a taxi to the station in the first place) and perhaps one could always take the bus (would be the best option if you are a masochist). So in a way, air travel is already pretty inconvenient, of course it would be silly to expect an Airbus A380 to stop outside my house just to pick up myself and a couple of overnight bags.

So infrastructure is important (a bit obvious there), my own preference is to catch the BTS to the Airport (there is a BTS Station walking distance away from my house). Even during rush hour, it would be possible for me to arrive at the airport in about forty five minutes to an hour, and that is pretty good especially in a country where you can spend two hours to travel less than two kilometres by car.

So infrastructure needs to be included into the ‘convenient’ equation, but that again is a national project that will take time to plan and complete. So let focus on once we have arrived at the airport.

For the past few months hell had been raised at the speed of ‘check in’ and ‘immigration’ at our almost brand new airport, many people have missed their flights due to the lightning pace they can process our documentation. Well since then, the process and facility seems to have improved, they had renovate the immigration area, and for us native we now have ‘high tech’ stations with marvelous swinging doors (the feeling is similar to Arnold’s Total Recall), where they asked you to scan in your passport and fingers, followed by a snapshot of your face.

Nice lady behind a desk

Checking in, I’d guess one of the best development is the ‘Internet Check In’, that is all well and good if you don’t have any luggage, since most of us would like to change our clothes, having a bag of two is quite reasonable. How can we speed up the ‘check in’ process?

Let us breaking down the ‘check in’ process by function, checking passport to see if it is valid for travel, checking your reservation/ticket, checking in your luggage (overweight?), reserving your seats and to say ‘thank you for flying with us’ (do they still do that?), then they issue the boarding card and immigration card for you to fill out.

Would it be possible to get rid of passport in its current book form? A better alternative would probably be passport card, with digital visa. If you are from a developing country, applying for a visa to enter America or Japan is like an asking a three year old to beat Mr. Bolt at the 100 metre dash, but that is another issue altogether. Back to the passport card, perhaps all of the ticketing stuff can be loaded onto the passport card too.

One Card to rule them all, one Card to find them, one Card to bring them all and in the darkness speed us through the check in and immigration desk. Our lives could be so much easier, just hand over the passport/ticket card at the check in desk, if there are any overweight baggage charge, one could possible charge it to the card too (wishful thinking here), one swipe of the card and all is done, no need to flip through the pages, checking if the name on the passport is the same as on the ticket, no need to delay the queue on overweight baggage payment.

However I do believe the boarding card will still need to exist, my memory is worst than a goldfish with amnesia, so having a physical card helps, and there are two more functions to it, one for when you purchase duty free goods (they need to refer to it), and finally in case there is a seat dispute on the plane (it happens to all of us sooner or later).

You are such a drag

I’ve been mulling over luggage, and so far haven’t come up with a better/faster way than the current barcode stickers thingy. Well there was this one very silly idea, luggage recognition. So when the nice lady/gentleman check you in, at the same time a camera then ‘recognise’ your luggage, linking it to your flight, from then using a similar tool to facial recognition sends your bags to the right handler to be loaded onto the correct plane... meh... considering that most of the businessmen uses identical grey samsonite suitcases, even Sequoia from IBM would have problem sending it to the correct destination.

So the barcode sticker thingy it is, but perhaps we could apply similar process to web check in, we can print out the barcode and somehow (this is a huge somehow) stick it to your bags :) before we arrive at the airport, assuming all of us has a printer at home... oh dear this is another ‘meh’ idea isn’t it.

Yes Sir, No Ma'am, please, I just want to go on a holiday

Immigration desk has been the bane for many travellers (especially here :)), the long queue whether arriving or departing, over here we also need to hand over the immigration card filled by hand, with the usual information, name, address, flight number, where are you staying, how many tattoos do you have and where they are located.

Logically one could also add digitally the embarkation/immigration card into the passport card too, no need to fill anything, and more importantly the officers can just throw out their stamp, everything will be digital and put onto the passport card. I think the only proof of who we are can just be a simple case of a fingerprint scan done once and kept in the record (so the next time there won’t be a need to scan the fingers again, this is now being used in Malaysia).

Taking it to the extreme, no more officers will be needed, just a card and fingerprint scanner gate, of course the black belt ninjitsu master security guards will still be lurking behind some pillars just to make sure we behave ourselves.

Off with your pants, please sir.

What comes after immigration? The dreaded security checks for your personal belongings, and a chance to remove all your liquids and soon in the future it will include what is in your bowel as well :) off with the belt, shoes and your dangerous collection of coins, please don’t forget to remove your notebook from the lead lined bag too.

So how can we speed things up here? I’d guess we should find a way for all of us to maintain what dignity we have left in today’s modern society, and not having to remove a single item from our body. Well, apart from the full body instant ‘nudie show’ scanner, which blows the ‘dignity’ part sky high, I can’t really think of a more convenient alternative.

Another waiting room?

Just before boarding, why on earth do we have to have our boarding and passport checked once more time, if this is a security issue then I’ll let it be, otherwise just cut out this process, and just let us board the blooming plane :)

Taxi!

Not exactly the ones with wheels, waiting to taxi off can take forever, so the video I saw on Airbus’ website made perfect sense for me, ‘Vertical’ takeoff, no more waiting, just go when you the last git manages to pull his fat arse away from the bar and wobble to the plane. This technology already exists, but putting it on to a commercial airline may be many years away yet.

Realistically, will these changes ever come to light, may be, will it be here in the next ten years… meh… :) Looks like my great grand children will be flicking through their paper passports, waiting in long queue just to get a silly little stamp, then more waiting, and waiting and taking off their shoes and belt, and more waiting… :)

Take me to the Park

Dear Matt & March,

Last weekend we got bored of going to the same old places, and decided to head for Suan Lumpinee. Can’t really remember when was the last time we were all here together, but it was definitely worth it.

Decided to take Matt onto the boat, this time we bought a couple of bags of bread to feed the fishes. I was over the moon when I saw a turtle (not the ninja kind), swimming towards me, and managed to feed it a couple of pieces of bread, that was until the school of fish came, I’d guessed he was a bit %$##ed and went home :)

We were thinking of make this a regular visit, so prepare for loads more pics from the park :)

You can certainly try :)

Dear Matt,

I’ll certainly give you full marks for your perseverance.

Even with 2 fully function arms you would still find it tough to climb up this pole, but you certainly gave it a %$^^%$# good try though :)

Stuck in the big red box

Dear Matt,

It is rare to catch you properly looking right at the camera, so in that alone this is one of my fav. photo this year. As you can see your arm in the cast, but it hasn’t slowed you down one bit, in fact it gave you a sense of being indestructible :)

You kept (on purpose of course) banging it into metal doors or metal gates, I’d guess you just love the clanging sound :) then when I asked “Matt did you hurt your arm?”, you would look straight at me, then again banged your cast as hard as you could on the metal gate, follow by “No Papa, it doesn’t hurt”, CLANG, “see!” :)

What else is going on with you? We decided to change your summer school, with four more weeks to go. You are now back at Noddy Play Group, and it’s like you are a different person, happy again. Of course your old teachers and care taker were over the moon to have you back, although only for a couple of weeks.

Do pass me the spoon :)

Dear Marcella,

Can’t believe you are already eight months old! We are now just poking our noses into August, and there have been so many changes for you. First of all you are now on formula milk, not all the time though, just when Gio isn’t around, and you have adapted to it brilliantly.

You are moving on your own now (felt off the bed once, sorry), we can’t say you are crawling yet, it’s like a slithering more than anything. But there is a sign that soon you’ll on all fours. You have shown signs that you’ll be crawling like Matt when he was little, hands and toes… :) just imagine Spider Man doing his wall stance but on the floor.

Your solid food development is fantastic, to be perfectly honest, your mother have put a lot, I mean a lot of effort into your food. Slow cooking over hours, full of great stuff like, liver, all known vegetables, brown rice, potatoes, chicken, pork and so on. To tell you the truth, after your mother bashes it to pulp, it looks exactly the same as what comes out from your bottom :) haa haa haa.