Singapore, of course, is notorious for being being a boringly sterile land of laws. I’ll have to get back to you on that, but in such a harsh legal climate, one would expect smoking to be outlawed. It’s not, but you could say it’s strongly discouraged:

The cigarette packs themselves convey a pretty strong anti-smoking message. Rather than a wordy Surgeon General’s warning (USA) or a direct declaration like “SMOKING KILLS” (UK and Canada), the packs here devote half their surface area to actual pictures of mouth cancer… ew.

My first impression of Singapore, actually, is that it’s a boringly sterile land of malls. Last night, for example, we asked our concierge to recommend a nice restaurant that wasn’t inside a mall, and he said, “all of our restaurants are in malls. It’s the Singapore way.” I suppose it’s not such a bad thing, considering the good stuff you can get in the food courts here… yum:

So, everything they say about Singapore Airlines is true. The level of in-flight service was far beyond anything I’ve experienced. The food was excellent, the entertainment selection was massive, and the flight attendendants seemed to be able to read minds – bringing green tea and fresh fruit, for example, just when it was most needed. I was too embarassed to take pictures, but I promise to try to get over that on the return flight.

Continuing the trend, this hotel, the Conrad Centennial Hilton, is defintely one of the nicest I’ve stayed in. Some of the amenities…

nice view	pillow menu	rubber ducky

mmmmm… buckwheat pillows.

For some reason we can’t remember, we decided to fly Singapore Airlines out of LAX instead of SFO, which meant we had to create our own connecting flight on the front end. It meant we could fly from the US to Singapore nonstop, but it also added a few hours to the overall journey.

A quick poll of the team suggests this route was the client’s recommendation. We followed it without questioning it, and Tracy and I vowed to take this as a lesson learned. We want to bring imagination and brave new thinking to this project, and we won’t do that if we just blindly follow the recommendations of others.

Tracy: Before (looking fabulous)	Tracy: After (looking only slightly less fabulous)

Monday. That means all-you-can-eat dim sum style pizza tonight at Goat Hill Pizza! Basically, that means they serve all their regular pizza varieties, but they walk around like dim sum servers, offering little slices to the salivating throng.

And pizza, of course, means… beer!

Beer lovers, check out RateBeer.com, the creation and pet project of one Joseph Tucker. I interviewed him once, for a job at Vodafone. He was tremendously qualified – far too qualified to work for the likes of me – and he seemed like a super nice guy. He told me he created the site simply as a place where he and a few friends could talk about their favorite beers, and now…

“RateBeer is widely recognized as the most accurate and most-visited source for beer information. RateBeer is an independent world site for craft beer enthusiasts and is dedicated to serving the entire craft beer community through beer education, promotion and outreach.”
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A couple of weeks ago, I went sailing with Mike Casey for the fourth time. We had a nice steady, strong breeze that never reached anything like the gales we experienced on previous trips. This time we had a few skippers and, like every other trip, multiple Mikes. See the pics in the extended entry.
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I bought a kayak yesterday (mine’s red – better pic coming soon) so that I could ride herd on the Alcatraz Invitational. My friend Tracy swam it in an amazing 51 minutes.