Linkdump: editing and related matters

A bunch of handy links/references related to editing:

• "That's the way to do it": The difference between "that" and "which", helpfully and clearly explained by David Marsh on the Guardian Style blog. I look this up every now and then, usually when a convoluted sentence trips me up.
  
• "The Most Comma Mistakes": Ben Yagoda at the New York Times gets down and dirty with commas and identifiers, and comma splices. My dad sent me this link last night and I knew most of this stuff but only intuitively --- not as sharply delineated as Yagoda's laid out here.
• And here's some good advice I've come across recently on how one can vet a freelance editor: a long, entertaining and insightful shpiel by user HapiSofi on the AbsoluteWrite forum, and Victoria Strauss's "Vetting an Independent Editor" on her blog Writer Beware.
  

HDB 5-room flat sizes, 1974-2016

The Straits Times reports today that the minister for national development, Khaw Boon Wan, said at an event last night that sizes of HDB flats are not shrinking and have been the same for the past 15 years (source: "HDB flat sizes have remained unchanged the past 15 years: Khaw Boon Wan").

I've been looking at HDB flats on the resale market since before Christmas. It's easy to be confused about the actual size of each individual flat, given the many different flat designs out there. My go-to resource is the official HDB Resale Flat Prices website, which provides not only flat prices but the year of construction and floor area of the corresponding flat.

Here are some numbers for floor areas of 5-room flats, which I plucked off the website tonight (other sources as indicated):

• "standard" flat in Farrer Road (built 1974): 120 sq m.
• "improved" flat in Zion Road (built 1974): 114-117 sq m.
• "standard" flat in Marine Parade (built 1977): 117-120 sq m.
• "improved" flat in Toa Payoh (built 1986): 122 sq m.
• "improved" flat in Sin Ming (built 1986-1990): 120-125 sq m.
• "improved" flat in Queenstown (built 1996): 121-125 sq m.
• "improved" flat in Queenstown (built 1997-1998): 121-122 sq m.
• "improved" flat in Sengkang (built 1999): 123 sq m.
• "improved" flat in Sengkang (built 2002): 110 sq m.
• "improved" flat in Pinnacle@Duxton (built 2009): 105-108 sq m (internal). (source: unattributed information at MyHomeTown.sg online forum)
• "improved" flat in Bedok Central (built 2010): 112 sq m.
• "premium" flat at SkyVille@Dawson (to be completed 2014): 98-101 sq m (internal). (source: HDB information reproduced at MyHomeTown.sg online forum)
• "standard" flat at Sengkang (to be completed 2014-2015): 110 sq m (internal). (source: HDB sales launch webpage)
• "standard" flat at Yishun (to be completed 2015): 110 sq m (internal). (source: HDB sales launch webpage)
• "standard" flat at Clementi (to be completed 2016): 110 sq m (internal). (source: HDB sales launch webpage)
  

That is all.

Ira Glass on Storytelling

Over the weekend I caught up with my young-punk friends* David and Lisa, and we were gushing over how much we enjoy Brain Pickings, and they were saying how chuffed they were when Brain Pickings shared Dave's short film thing, and I thought I knew what they were talking about and went "uh-huh" very sagely --- but when I got home and looked at the link from Lisa, I realised, oops, that I hadn't seen it before, and also it's a perfect way to send people off into the work week.

So without further ado, here is Dave's short motion graphics piece, "Ira Glass on Storytelling":



* Dave and Lisa aren't really young punks. I just call them that because I like the sound of it.

Clocking time

There are two things that I've been doing these days when I work at home (in addition to, you know, the work). One is clocking time using Toggl; the other is pacing myself using the Pomodoro technique. This may sound like I spend a lot of time clicking "start" and "stop" on either timer, but using Toggl becomes quite intuitive once you've spent a day or so with it, and with the Pomodoro Time Management iPhone app, I barely remember the timer is running until it cues me with an excited "ding!".

I've eschewed time-clocking tools and apps for most years of freelancing because I didn't want to feel like I was clocking in and out of a factory or an office. (One of my temp jobs before university was working as a clerk in an electronics factory and we had to punch in and out on time cards, same as all the other non-office employees.) What made me change my mind now was realising that after freelancing for more than six years, I often have only a very vague idea of how much time I've put in on each assignment because I'm often juggling multiple projects at the same time. This way, at least I can tell people with some confidence exactly how much time the work takes out of me (and believe me, it's surprising sometimes).

As for Pomodoro, call it a last-ditch attempt to kill the procrastination monster that's plagued me for most of my life. (My flatmate in London can attest to that; her favourite line is, "I always thought she was this super-organised person, and after living with her, I found out she's always doing things at the last minute!") Pomodoro teases me with the reward of a five-minute break after every 25 minutes of solid work, which is great even if use those five minutes just to do the dishes or refill the water jug. More importantly, it helps to break up extended tasks (like long pieces of writing or editing) into more manageable portions, so I don't feel I'm spending all afternoon at it.

Even though I am. It's just a trick, I know.

Tick tock, tick tock, time for bed.

Big city life

I came across this news headline "MRT lines to see weekend closures for upgrading works: Lui" today (via @STcom on Twitter) and I couldn't help but think, ah, just like London, where I used to subscribe to Transport for London's email updates on weekend Tube line closures for maintenance/ engineering works, so that I knew which lines to avoid when I went out. I guess Singapore has made it to global citydom after all, when commuters are getting used to regular MRT breakdowns (psst, Mana Rapid Transit is a pretty cool iPhone app for getting breakdown/congestion alerts) and subway lines have to be closed during official operating hours so that the work crews can keep up with the infrastructural wear and tear.

I'm not complaining (not too much, anyway). I'm saying we're there, kinda. Big city life means congestion and crowds and things breaking down here and there. (Although most big cities don't pay their municipal elected officials quite as much, nor give public service operators quite so generous a budget as Singapore does, to keep things running smoothly.)

Or does it? Yesterday I was reading "The Science of Quieter Cities" in the Atlantic, about research that various scientists and engineers are doing to see how architectural and urban design can make crowded, noisy cities less unpleasant, less grating on the ears (and the soul). We can all live together in close quarters, but we don't have to live miserably or in conditions that breed misanthropy. The individuals planning, building and living in cities just have to insist on healthier, more humane living environments --- and I don't mean just air-conditioning all our interiors.

Singapore the city-state is a phenomenally noisy place. A couple of months ago, I was walking one evening along Holland Road towards the Dempsey area, and it struck me that despite the passing traffic, I could hear crickets, a dense chorus of crickets, emanating from the thick jungly surroundings. Earlier this week, I was back at Dempsey, this time outside RedDot Brewhouse, and I pointed out the cricket sounds to my friend's husband, who lives in Adelaide. He's been visiting Singapore regularly since the late 1990s and, nodding in acknowledgement of the cricket noises, he remarked that on this trip he's been struck by how inescapable the urban noise now is. I wonder to myself if it's getting impossible to think. (See also Marcus Ng's piece "The Nature of Noise" on POSKOD.SG.)

I'm lucky. I'm typing this in my living room, in a flat on a very high floor, relatively immured from most street noise. I'm surrounded by several thousand residents within a five-minute walking radius, but from this vantage point I don't hear many of them. Just once in a while the neighbour's dog, people in the lift landing, the television or piano from someone's flat downstairs (or upstairs?), and the bus accelerating up the hill below. Mostly I hear the whirring of my fan.

The public housing flats where I live were built in 1970. We don't need sophisticated technology or newfangled ideas to make our neighbourhoods more liveable, or to make our trains run on time. We just need common sense and a little human sympathy applied to prevailing systems.

Silly writer is silly

I said something silly when I was speaking to a group of university students earlier this week. (I also spilled coffee on myself while their eyes were all trained on me, but that's another story.) These were university students nearing the end of a course on popular culture in Singapore, and I was supposed to talk about Singapore: A Biography, the writing of history, the role of memory, nostalgia and so on.

In the midst of some blatheration about the importance of everyday living spaces, and how heritage should be something alive, not dead and documented, I said frivolously, "I think we should blow up Orchard Road and start over." Which, for anyone reading this without their sarcasm-meter turned on, I of course did not mean literally, but that wasn't the reason I kicked myself later for saying it. No, it bugs me that I said it because I was implying that Orchard Road --- and its identikit malls, and its crowds, in all its tiresome glory --- wasn't 'real' culture, was somehow less worthy than everyday lived spaces like provision shops and coffeeshops and hawker centres. That shopping and mall culture was something we (as Singapore) should disown and eradicate.

Which, at its heart, is an unworthy, totalitarian impulse that I shouldn't give voice to, even in jest. We hear enough diktats in Singapore about what should or should not happen, should or should not be spoken. I don't need to be perpetuating that way of thinking. Less silencing, more speaking.

Now coming to you from Queenstown

I moved house two days ago, which was a less hectic operation than the last (count 'em) four house moves since 2008, because it didn't involve moving to a different country nor moving much furniture. When the movers showed up, they said, "That's all?" Yay me.

I'm now living in Queenstown, which feels like life's come almost full circle (in the same way that Singapore's newest Circle Line on the MRT is almost but not quite a full circle), because I grew up at Normanton Park, which I can see from my windows now, and as a kid I spent a lot of time at the Queenstown library, the stationery shops, the hawker centre and the supermarket.

Those are mostly gone now, naturally --- I say naturally because this is Singapore, where 100-year-old trees are chopped down without much ado, and 100-year-old cemeteries filled with tombstones to illustrious personages are not safe if urban planners decide a new four-lane road is needed instead. So the hawker centre with the breezy two-storey layout is gone, as is the supermarket building and multi-storey car park adjoining it, as are all the family-run stationery stores. The library's survived, I'm not sure how; I should pop in one day for old times' sake.

Living in Queenstown also puts me closer to the Southern Ridges and Labrador Park. G-man drove me to the latter yesterday in search of lunch, which I think was my first time there in at least a decade, if not two. (Everything looked too quiet and we ended up eating at VivoCity, also because I needed to get a mobile broadband setup.)

Before you ask, yes, it'll be weird not being in the East after 12+ years, but I'd imposed too long already on the dear friend who put me up since September (and my cats a year before that). If I could afford to, I'd move back East in a heartbeat. We shall see.