Don't make fun of my grammar ...

... because she's a lovely lady, as the joke goes.

Baby cousin but I can't identify which one

Actually I hardly knew my grandma because I was only a few years old when she died. For a while she lived in our house and then moved to my uncle's house where she died. One memory I have (but one can never be sure if some early memories are simply mental recreations of a verbal account) is of own volition taking a bowl of congee to spoon feed her. She must have mentioned it later to other adults, saying the congee was too hot (I probably took the bowl while it was still cooling), but she appreciated the gesture. No, I wasn't an especially kind-hearted kid or anything like that, just a kid learning by imitating adults, like those kids who want to help adults carry shopping.

My dad's calculators

Being an accountant, dad was interested in labour-saving calculators. Here is the first appearance of an electro-mechanical calculator in the mid-60s. The photo was taken by him in his Ampang Road office:

Unfortunately the photo was taken for the sake of the people, who I think were shareholders of the taxi company he was the secretary of, so you don't see much of the calculator. But here's another shot taken by me perhaps in 1972:

By this time he was working in his home office. (The chess player is my schoolmate. He had constructed the chessboard himself. It was actually an overturned wooden box which held the chess pieces for transport. Also notice the use of algebraic notation.) But back to the calculator. Based on the fact that it could do long division, I have determined that it's the Olivetti Divisumma 24GT described in detail here. It was already over a decade old when my dad bought one, but it took that many years to be affordable for Malaysians. By the time of the second photo, it was seldom used as he had an electronic calculator. I don't remember the Olivetti in his effects when he died in 1978 so he may have disposed of it already (university students could afford scientific calculators by 1976). There was a portable electronic printing calculator in his effects.

My dad had an older hand operated pinwheel mechanical calculator that was lying around, out of use, by the time I was old enough to poke around his office. From what I remember, it's probably this Odhner model:

You could do division by repeated subtraction.

He also had a pocket addiator which I have mentioned in this post. I never saw him use it much and it became my plaything at some point.

I seem to remember he did give me some lessons on using an abacus when I was required to learn it in Chinese primary school.  It makes sense that he would know this too.

Outside my dad's office

I still remember the address of my dad's office: 75 Ampang Road. Here's a photo I took in the late 60s of the street outside it. Sorry about the blemishes but it's a miracle the negative is even legible.

P: Billboard advertising Philips: Look forward to the future. As if you could look backwards to the future, hahaha. As mentioned before Philips was a major brand of radios and home entertainment equipment in Malaysia.

N: A car with N plates from Negeri Sembilan (literally 9 states), a small state to the south of Selangor, where KL is situated. Why is it seemingly blocking a lane? It isn't broken down and nobody is waiting in it. It's actually double parked. Perhaps the owner was nearby, ready to move it if asked to. This reminded me how lax road regulation enforcement was in those days of relatively sparse traffic.

B: Selangor plates started with B. I think Perak started with A, being the first to have cars, and after B they went to mnemonic letters.

R: A restaurant, actually a "coffee shop", serving Hainanese Chicken Rice.

C: This appears to be an advertisement for 555 State Express, a brand of cigarette. Which reminds me I once found a non-functional lighter amongst my dad's stuff. When I asked how he came about it, he said he had once been a smoker. Apparently he had been a hard man until he got religion, before I was born.

7: Advertisement for 7-Up and another soft drink.

D: Next door to my dad's office was a dispensary, what we now call a GP's surgery. The term referred to the fact that the doctor prescribed medications and his assistants compounded them in-house. I believe they mixed some garish colouring into the milky liquid medications so that patients wouldn't think they were beverages. So a dispensary was a one-stop shop. This one was headed by a relative of my mother, but we didn't go there often, perhaps there was another more convenient to our home. In any case they were all pretty much of equal competence, products of the British medical school system.

For comparison, here is a Google Street View of the rough location. So much has changed that I cannot identify the exact spot my photo was taken, but I think it's close to where the vegetation in front of tall buildings in the middle of the view is.

A Malaysian tin mine

These photos followed the pictures of the trip with my dad by overnight train to Taiping. So it's quite likely that the purpose of that trip was to inspect a tin mine. Besides working for a taxi company, he also kept the accounts of at least a couple of tin mines.

Tin mining used to occupy a prominent portion of the Malaysian economy—in 1979 Malaysia produced almost a third of the world's tin—then the price collapsed in the mid-1980s and the mines became exhausted. The deposits in Malaysia are alluvial cassiterite. Today tin is an important metal for technology; your phone uses solder. China, Indonesia and Peru appear to be the largest producers at the moment.

Sorry about the blemishes in the photos but these are the only ones I have. Here you see a worker breaking the deposits with a water jet, called a monitor.

The gravel slurry is then pumped up to a top of a palong with sluices where the heavier minerals sink and are trapped in dividers and later harvested. In the picture is a tank of diesel for the machinery. The tailings are returned to other pits and the water reused.

Tin mining leaves large holes in the ground. In those days nobody thought to legislate rehabilitation so these ponds became scars on the earth. The resort The Mines near KL are built on a former mine with the hole now serving as a lake.

In 2007, the house magazine of the engineering body in Malaysia published an article on the history of tin mining in Malaysia.

Tin mining brought many Chinese immigrants to Malaya in the 19th century. I probably would not be writing this were it not for this history.

The Johor - Singapore causeway

This photo doesn't need annotation as there are only a couple of things of interest. The year would have been 1966. I definitely took this photo from the LH window as my father would have been driving.

We are on the causeway between Singapore and peninsula Malaysia. Singapore had left Malaysia in August 1965 so this was a border checkpoint.

The lorry has Johor plates, as the ID starts with J. The A refers to the class of load allowed.

On the top of the building, which is on the Malaysia side, you can see the Singapore and Malaysian flags. The slogan in front reads GUNAKAN-LAH BAHASA KEBANGSAAN (use the national language), as Malaysia was in the process of phasing out English.

Customs and border formalities were conducted at the Malaysian side. Here is another shot, from an earlier trip, showing the customs inspection benches. That may be my sister and father in the middle of the picture.

Singapore, 1965

This picture was the first in a roll of 35mm pictures taken in Singapore when we visiting there. Probably a throw-away shot to ensure that the shots started on a good part of the film after the film was loaded at a camera shop. But it reveals Singapore as it was 55 years ago.

S: Singapore car plates started with S. Each of the states in Malaysia had their own letter. The second letter tells you how recent the car was.

R: Siera was a brand of radio sold in Southeast Asia. We didn't actually have any of their products, but the brand name rings a bell. I've just discovered that they came from Belgium. Another brand from Europe was Philips, from Eindhoven in the Netherlands, of course.

P: Parker pens and Quink were widely used.

B: The Chinese characters read Chung Wah book shop. This is where you could buy paperback literature and textbooks in Chinese. Which reminds me that in those days Taiwan was well-known for pirating books. My father asked my sister upon graduating from a Taiwan university to buy the then 24 volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Some volumes she brought back in her luggage, some she asked others to carry. Miraculously all volumes arrived in KL eventually and I used them for years. But that pirate version would not have been sold in Singapore or Malaysia, which had British ties.

F: What is a bargain at $1 discount per yard? Fabric! These were sold from bolts and Singapore had more variety than KL, and I think no excise duty, so people came to buy here. Then back home they would engage dressmakers to turn it into clothes.

E: Finally, the location of the photo? South Bridge Road which is still named thus in modern Singapore though it's certain that none of those businesses in the photo are extant. How can I tell? The bridge in the distance is Elgin Bridge, spanning Singapore River. (Incidentally it was the father of the bridge's namesake who took the Marbles.) The other side of the bridge is North Bridge Road. The roads actually run from NE to SW, not N to S. You can also see that circulation is one-way. The other direction was provided by New Bridge Road (of course), one block to the NW of this location.

My bedroom, circa 1974

These were pictures I took to finish the roll, like the one of the gas cylinder and bananas. But they now provide a window into the way things were.

T: A turntable for playing vinyl records.

A: A self-constructed amplifier, hence the incomplete mess.

C: My pride and joy, a cassette deck, possibly a Sony or Panasonic one, with Dolby, which was a big deal because this reduced the noise in quiet passages, and improved the frequency response.

S: All this sat on top of a metal cabinet with swing doors where I stored other stuff. I don't remember exactly what, possibly vinyl records, electronics components and camera equipment. My clothes were probably in the wardrobe at the right of the photo.

P: The case of the tripod with which I probably took this photo.

To the left of the cabinet was my workbench, which was a writing desk.

P: A homemade power board with various types of sockets. You can see one power cable going to the digital clock.

D: Digital LED clock. In those days, single chip digital clocks were recent and it was a big deal to have one of these clocks instead of the old analog dial clocks or flip display clocks. You can see lots of transistors and resistors on this board driving the 4 LED digits. The main board holding the clock chip is behind. There is a more detailed picture in this post.

I: Writing implements. As expected I had lots of pens and pencils, and there is another clutch of them on the right. The pill tubes probably held electronics components. I don't remember what the spray can contained. Maybe it was a tin of lacquer. The can with a spout I recognise, it was a can of sewing machine oil, which was useful as a light lubricating oil, not just for sewing machines.

B: Notebooks and books. I also see a copy of Mathematics in the Modern World, which was a selection of readings from Scientific American. I was presented with this as a school prize. I may still have it.

V: This was a vacuum fluorescent tube digital clock in a nice wooden case, unlike my rough product, and was made by the company I worked for as a young technician for during holidays. It was probably on loan as I have no recollection of retaining it in my collection.

I don't remember what was behind the sliding perspex doors that last two are above. Possibly Japanese electronics trade magazines addressed to my brother.

Now my bookshelf, which was made of Dexion slotted angle iron strips, with wooden planks as shelves. It was a bookshelf construction technique I learnt from my dad.

G: A badminton racquet is visible, also a Monopoly set. The box with Japanese writing was an electronics beginners kit, a present from my brother studying in Japan. I have described it here. I don't remember what happened to it. I suspect I gave it away when my knowledge exceeded the limits of the kit.

M: These are probably hobby electronics magazines, all British. I see one Wireless World. The right half is probably Scientific American issues.

B: These were probably Readers Digest issues, and some general reading. Note the drinking bird toy.

T: Probably textbooks. I see a copy of Advanced Level Physics, which was my textbook in sixth form. At right is a blue cardboard box which used to hold darkroom photographic paper. At that point I had stopped doing darkroom work, instead taking slides and getting colour prints from photo shops so it contained old photos. I may still have this box.

Below the rack you see a capsule which is a National vacuum cleaner. I also recognise a duffel bag.

Composition in blue and yellow

No, I wasn't trying for abstract art. At the time I just wanted to finish the roll of film so that I could see the earlier photos. This was taken soon after the kitten and raffia photo, sometime in late 1974.

 The bananas are Pisang Rastali (often contracted to Tali by the Chinese and just called Tali Jiew), a variety hardly seen in Australia because they don't transport well, so are local to an area. More's the pity because there are so many varieties of bananas beyond Cavendish and Lady Finger, each with distinctive taste. These are my favourite variety.

The gas cylinder contained cooking gas, probably a mix of propane and butane. They were supplied by the Esso company. It seems its assets were acquired by Petron in 2013 so this brand no longer exists. The usual scheme was you had two cylinders at home and when one ran out you swapped in the full one and called Esso to exchange the empty cylinder for a full one. This was the cooking fuel for most households. There was no gas line network and the electricity network wasn't up to the load. So it was either gas or the older polluting and dangerous charcoal burners.

Kitten, string, and soft drink

Another in the series of retro photographic memory, from around 1974. As usual, click on the photo for a full sized version.

R: The kitten is playing with plastic raffia, which displaced the natural raffia for tying parcels. Which in retrospect was bad for the environment. That's probably the mother cat sleeping behind the kitten.

B: Bubble-up lime and lemon was a popular drink in Malaysia at the time. The slogan Kiss of Lemon, Kiss of Lime is visible. (I had not known it came from the US until I researched for this blog.) It was a competitor to 7 Up and had the advantage of supplying 10.5 fluid oz. instead of the 7 fluid oz. of 7 Up. The reason we had a couple of cases was because my dad liked to have soft drinks in the fridge. I liked it too. For most people soft drinks were taken in a "coffee shop" or restaurant, and only served in the home on special occasions such as Chinese New Year. The Green Spot brand of still orange drink was popular. Here you see it advertised on the signage of a restaurant in Kajang which was about an hour's drive south (in those days) from KL and was famous for satay restaurants. We had stopped there to lunch driving back from Segamat, where we had overnighted with my cousins on our way back from Singapore. The picture was taken from the restaurant we were lunching at. That hazy patch in the middle is probably the smoke from the satay braziers.

An early attempt at applying digital logic

It just came back today that one of my first attempts at applying digital logic was to detect someone dialing an outstation number on a phone line. If I recall correctly a friend of mine lived in a small hotel (his father was the caretaker) and asked if I could devise a circuit to detect 0 (the prefix for an outstation number) being dialed by an unauthorised person.

I didn't even have digital counter chips at that stage but I knew how to build bistable flip-flops from two transistors and also use diode logic to detect 10 on the counter. The difficulty was getting the pulses from the phone line. I don't recall getting it working, something stymied me, and it was only an idle query.

Now rotary dials and pulse dialing has gone the way of the dinosaurs. Even tone dialing too. And calls to mobile numbers are flat rate throughout a country.

The picture of my workbench was actually taken several years later, because there is a digital clock at the top of the picture using a single MOS clock chip driving vacuum fluorescent displays.

Dad in his office

It occurred to me that old photos depice people, landmarks, or artefacts of interest which might not be familiar to present-day readers. So I'm starting a series of annotated photographs. As usual, click on the photo for a full sized version.

B: My dad was the company secretary of the Silvertop Taxi Company. He was responsible for the day-to-day management of the business on behalf of the directors, and a lot of the work involved keeping ledgers and accounts. You can also see that he had two telephone lines. I seem to remember the phone number went from 4 digits to 5 digits as the population of Kuala Lumpur grew.

His steel desk, like many of the time, had a glass top. There's a map of Kuala Lumpur under it near the telephone, but I can't make out what's under it closer to him.

E: A cheque embosser. This is a machine that prints the amount of the cheque in numbers and words so that it is difficult to alter without detection. I recall it even had black and red ribbons. It's sitting on top of drawers containing different types (letterhead, colour, weight?) of paper, and maybe also carbon paper. Definitely not A4 but the old foolscap size.

T: My dad was a fan of the Hermes typewriters and had at least a couple of machines, one with san-serif (Helvetica?) type, which was different from the usual serif type. I think what's on the floor is the hard cover. Or maybe the body is half out of the cover.

I've been asked about the date of the photo. There is a calendar behind my dad but it's impossible to make out the year, except to note that there are two consecutive months of 31 and 30 days and the first day was a Sunday.

Another shot in the previous roll of film advertised an event happening on Sunday 19th December. 19th December fell on Sunday in 1965 and 1971. A shot later in the same roll shows me aged around 10. So the photo was probably taken in May or June 1966.

Drive-by shopping

Today, watching a video of Kuala Lumpur from 1970, I was reminded of my father's drive-by shopping habits.

The second street featured in the video, Petaling Street, was called 茨廠街 (ci⁴ cong² gaai¹) meaning tapioca factory street, by the Chinese. It is an area of street hawkers, including fruit carts. Naturally being a clogged street, you could only drive slowly through it. But that suited my father fine. A typical exchange would go:

Hawker: Fei-lo (fatso), duku-langsat are very good today!

Father: How much?

H: $2.50 a catty (斤, jin)

F: Alright give me 2.

(Exchanges money for newspaper cone of fruits through window, and drives on.)

You can't get more convenient than that!

Dad in his office

The other street mentioned, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, is named after the first Agong of Malaysia, but before that and for a long time afterwards, people still referred to it as Batu Road (Rock Road, perhaps there used be a quarry there?). It is a street of clothing and household goods shops. Up till about a decade ago, I would buy clothes there whenever I visited KL.

Ice cream zero

Eskalator kosong!

A Malay adjective that you will hear often in Malaysia is kosong meaning zero, empty, nothing. Naturally it's used to describe car parks, fields, buses, and that sort of thing, but it's also used as a modifier to indicate absence. For example teh kosong means black tea, and kopi kosong means black coffee, ais kosong means a glass of ice without water. However the Chinese, ever parsimonious with syllables, had teh-oh and kopi-oh. There is no ais-oh though.

I was reminded of this adjective when I recalled taking a visitor from Singapore around Sydney many years ago. At a Manly ice creamery she liked the smell of the waffle cones but didn't want to have ice cream. She asked the shop if they could sell her just a waffle cone, and they were. I quipped that she was having an ais-krim kosong.

Cheque for zero dollars and zero cents

At the Lone Pine Koala Sanctury

Today I recalled an anecdote my brother used relish telling, and decided to look it up. Briefly, in the story a person keeps getting computer printed demands to pay a debt of zero dollars and zero cents. After a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, the person decides to write a cheque for zero dollars and zero cents. The computer processes the cheque, a thank-you letter is sent, and that's the end of the matter. It's highly embellished in the version on Snopes. There was even a version set in Australia.

What do I think of this? First of all it plays to our wish to see computers as fallible and making ridiculous mistakes a human would immediately correct. Secondly the wealth of detail in some parts and lack of details in others suggests that the story has been burnished over the years. It's possible that a simple incident in the past, perhaps a computer printing out a cheque for zero dollars and zero cents was spotted and blocked by a human, then spun into an elaborate legend. But enjoy the anecdote anyway.

I came, I saw, I conked out

Today it came back to me that my father once chuckled at this pun. I also remembered that it came from one of the Carry On films. A bit of searching showed that it came from Carry On Cleo which is explicated at perhaps far greater than readable length in this blog post.

The Carry On franchise is evidence of 1960s British culture and sexual stereotypes. However for me the memory revealed a few things. The film was from 1964 and it almost certain that I viewed it in a KL cinema in tow by my father. He knew the original the pun was referring to, so he must have encountered it in school, probably Victoria Institution.

My father was a smart man. He passed on to me his love of tinkering.