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I’ve been in Singapore over 24 hours now and I’m shattered. Only getting sleep in 3-4 hour sessions, hopefully it’ll all be ironed out by Monday when the conference starts.

Sentosa, the Island I’m staying on, is beautiful, and there’s a ton of stuff to do, for everyone (kids, couples, a group of lads up for a session), from nice restaurants, to theme parks, beaches to golf. There seems to be quite a few Australian couples and family’s staying in this hotel.

A few things have caught my attention so far.

• Singapore drives on the left like the UK & Ireland. The most popular bands of car are Japanese (Honda, Mitsubishi, Toyota) and German (Mercedes Benz, BMW).
• I’ve spoken with 15-20 locals, mostly shopkeepers, bus drivers, taxi drivers, the hotel staff. The quality of English among those of Indian decent is perfect, those of Chinese/Malay decent have poor to no English. One bus driver had 4 words of English, of which the most common were “Sorry”, “English” and “No”.
• Busses are very frequent, and every stop services multiple lines (some 20+). Fares are based on distance travelled. Most people are using RFID cards to swipe on/off the bus. I haven’t found a way to pay for a transfer to another line using cash. The average trip costs ~€0.75.
• The sports at the university that were people were playing were soccer and rugby.
• High street shopping contains many brands familiar to one shopping in Dublin or London: Topman/Topshop, Pull and Bear, Esprit, Quicksilver, River Island, United Colors of Benetton, GAP, Lacoste, Marks & Spencer, Starbucks, The Body Shop, Prada, Giorgio Armani, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Dolce & Gabbana, and Bvlgari. There are also some brands I recognise but have never seen their brick and mortar stores before, like Patek Philippe, Cartier and The National Geographic.
• The internet connection in the hotel is decent. A Flash speed-test tells me I have a 11Mbps up/1Mbps down connection to a server in .sg. Blacknight’s flash test tells me I’m 1.2Mbps down/800Kbps upto Ireland. Blacknigh’s VoIP results are: 0% packet loss and 0.2% jitter. MTR to Google and Skynet.
• Internet is important here. Every ad I’ve seen has a “Find out fan page on Facebook” link, or the equivalent (I’m sure) in Chinese/Malay. M1 are advertising fibre heavily. 100Mbps synchronous fibre is apparently available to students for ~€23 a month. A 1Gbps synchronous connection costs ~€240 per month.
• Microsoft and the Singaporean government are the major players in TV, though MediaCorp and XINMSN. NewsCorp doesn’t have much of a footing.

Two of the retail staff of Indian decent I was chatting two showed a keen interest in Ireland, I was surprised by their level of knowledge. One was a shopkeeper in a news-agency, the other a tailor. Both knew of the Irish financial crises, both knew the name Anglo, and the tailor had a more in-depth knowledge of the public’s view of Cowen, Lenihan’s sickness, and NAMA. This was more than the information one could glean from the Economist, I suspect either Ireland pops up in the news here a lot, or there are many chatty Irish people here.

I picked up my poster today too, and promptly spilled coffee on it (it’s vinyl and wiped clean). Patrick Hayden’s tutorial on Information theory via decoupling was interesting.