Photos from my phone

I like my phone. The convenience of having a good camera built in to the phone is just great. I took some photos with it when I don't have my big Canon S3IS with me, and it recorded some of my life adventures.


This one is when I was transitting in Changi Airport, took a photo and tried the phone built-in image editing tool. [1/12/2006 8:47AM]


A flyer in the hotel room in Shanghai. Funny English. [6/12/2006 11:06PM]


Kelly was leaving back to Taiwan for good, so me and Michael caught up with her for a lunch and coffee. [13/12/2006 1:46PM]


Yeeting was flying back to Brunei for Christmas and New year Holiday. I sent her off to the airport. [21/12/2006 11:53AM]


I bumped into Eleanor couple of weeks ago and we decided to find one day to catch up. So we did 2 days before Christmas at the beautiful East Perth waterfront. [23/12/2006 4:43PM]


Nola invited me to the St George's Cathedral for a mid night service on Christmas. Very old Gothic style building, beautiful choir and music. Nice!
[24/12/2006 11:12PM]


Bloody Summer! My cassette converter melted in my car! Cost me $20! :`( [27/12/2006 1:23PM]


I found this big sun clock at Cottesloe Beach when I was jogging there. Cool! And this is the kind of photo I will not get without the convenience of a camera phone. And it was almost 8pm then, still pretty bright, I love daylight saving! :D [28/12/2006 7:45PM]

Python ate a whole pregnant ewe in Malaysia

Another piece of (old) news about Malaysia that I picked up browsing the net.

Python ate a whole pregnant ewe in Malaysia

On National Geography

Bosnia pyramid search

I came across this possible pyramid awhile ago when it was first discovered. Now Malaysian has role in the Bosnian pyramid find! And as I follow the link to the official website www.piramidasunca.ba, I found more interesting video and coverage about this exciting discovery.

Personally, I think it's very possible that there is a pyramid there. And hope that the discovery work won't destroy the energy pattern and the very reason why it is there. I'm sure ShihChing will be very excited to know it's progress as well.

And under the Daily News tab of the website, the team is now in Malaysia meeting many prominent Malaysians there.

Winter Solstice Festival Today

Thanks Wilson for letting me know that it's Winter Solstice Festival (冬至) today.

I'm going to get some glutinuous rice ball (called tang yuan) now. :)

China Trip log

If you're waiting for my China trip log. I'm afraid it won't be much. It was almost 95% working. Not really stressful for me but I didn't get to have much time for sightseeing. The only time I had was about 1.5 hour after 9pm to walk around my hotel. Only food places and 24 hours convenient shops are open at that hours. Anyhow, I still got quite some amusement out of those places. The kind of stuff selling on the shelves, the super cheap prices, fried chicken wing or sausages on the road side (I didn't try any, I was too full)....
I passed by a florist, it was cold that night. The boss saw me looking around and just asked me in and started boiling tea, and we had a nice chat over some tea. That was surprising. He couldn't tell I'm not from China at all, Haha! I haven't met anyone in Shanghai who could tell I'm not a mainland Chinese, I guess my Mandarin accent is close enough.

The highlight of this trip is probably food. It's so cheap to eat in China. 8 people, in a VIP room with 1-2 dedicated waitresses, 8 entree cold dishes, 8 hot main dishes, soup, sweets, complimentary fruits, and beers - it never got over RMB600. So it's like about AU$100 for 8 people. A simple Penang fried horfun cost $6.80 in Broadway Fair here in Perth. A super posh dinner in Shanghai cost two hawker style lunch here!
Oh ya, I saw some small restaurant selling hawker style dinner for RMB6, that's like a dish pour on top of rice. The same thing probably costs $7 in Northbridge.

So much about the food, I think it's only fair to post a photo here to capture the variety of it.

Some of them are noteworthy:
[7,5] BBQ duck Lower jaw including tongue - so weird! Not much meat but taste good.
[5,6] duck head from the duck and bamboo shot soup [3,3], no one actually ate that head lah.
[7,6:7] wheat bun with hole to be stuffed with fried meat+vegies, 'westerners' seem to like that. Not bad for me too.
[1,6] another 'westerner' favourite - make your own burger.
[3,4] lotus root stuffed with sweet sticky rice. I like it very much.
[2,2] Horse Bridge (马桥) Tofu, Horse Bridge is a place not far from Shanghai I was told. Very tasty tofu.
[2,6] corn slab, very sweet and juicy.
[2,7] 梅菜扣肉 dried salted vegi with fatty pork on top (can't quite see the dried vegies). Taste great! Like mama used to cook at home.
[5,3] Pagoda vegies (塔菜). Very green, tasty. It's like a pagoda when alive, a bit like the purple gourmet lettuce but flatter.
[4,5] Pumpkin pudding with coconut milk on top. Yummy.
[6,4] Fish pudding with salty egg yolk on top. Yummy.
[6,7] Australian scallop. It's huge! 5cm diameter.
[7,1] One of my favourite soup. It's like shark fin soup without shark fin so it's not as thick and gluey. The white strips are very thin tofu, silky smooth. Very nice!
[7,3] Another one of the best soup. Fish head seafood soup. It's milky white and taste like all good stuffs are in there. Very very nice!
[5,7] seaweed that looks like centipede. Taste like seaweed.
[6,1] One last one, Chili chicken (辣子鸡丁). It's very difficult to find the chicken. So much chili I can't believe it!

Chia and Joanne's ROM

Ah Chia and Joanne are engaged! Congratulations!!!

The Registration ceremony was held on last Sunday in Singapore and now only I get the photos together and post it here.

I was in transit back from Shanghai to Perth in Singapore then, my flight arrived at Changi airport at 5:30am, met up with YongQin and KokWee at around 7am. They brought me to have some Roti Canai and zuige (rice cake with fried salty radish). KokWee thought the Roti is really bad quality, but it was enough to satisfy me as I haven't had it for a long time. :P
Then we hanged around at their flat and the water front area not far from their place before we headed to the place Chia and Joanne's ceremony took place.


The ceremony was simple and sweet. They both look great! Black and red, classic! I took heaps of photos, the two models are great! :) After the ceremony, we went to a nearby park to took more artistic shots. That was nice too.


And we had a group photo for the University of Tasmania alumni presented there. It was a pity that Albert didn't make it.


We had a buffet lunch after the ceremony, then YongQin, KokWee and myself went to a nearby Fire museum, a digital superstore, and a camera shop. By then we were all exhausted. We went back to their place to rest a bit, loaded the photos into their computer and then it was time for me to get back to airport again.

I got back to Perth at 1:40am, took bloody half an hour to get my luggage and long queue at quarantine. My housemate waited for me for almost an hour, by the time we got home, it was 3:30am! And it wasn't bad enough, my housemate was leaving to China at 10am that day. So I sent him to airport at 8am and really struggled to kept my mind alert to drive home safe. I really had to make every effort to move my body every couple of second so that my eye won't close. It didn't feel that bad at that time, but thinking back, it was rather tough.

Let Christmas be a season for giving to the most in need

I found this Oxfam Christmas present website through Nick's holiday wish list.

I think it's a brilliant idea. Give the right gift to someone in need is the best gift. Will I receive a card like that too?

Dec China Trip Day 1

I got on to the flight at 2am 1/12. Singapore airline. There was no drama from Perth to Singapore. I watched a Chinese movie "Dragon Tiger Gate" and got 2 hours of sleep. Then we were in transit in Singapore Changi airport for 3 hours. Spent most of the time in the transit lounge, enjoying some foot massage and reading my book. I gave couple of friends and family a call, free call in Singapore, why not? :P We hopped on to the plane again at 10am to Shanghai.

The S'pore-Shanghai flight was more of a drama. The Shanghai Pudong airport was having some military exercise and was closed when we arrived. So we could not land then and had to detour to Nanjing and landed there to wait. So I'd been to Nanjing too, haha! Anyway, we were in Nanjing for about an hour before we flew back to Shanghai airport when they are open again... Altogether 3 hours delay. And I got a lot more sleep because of that.


We stay at Ramada hotel. Not bad. RMB450 a night. We had dinner at the restaurant in the hotel. I like the food too. Good that there's no sharkfin tonight and have plenty of vegies. The Nan2ru3 fatty pork is very tasty too, very fat, but yummy.... :a

I didn't take much photo today. I was busy at the dinner table as we've been 3 hours behind, so they tried to get some things sorted out during dinner. But I still managed to eat to my stomach's content. :D So full now...

I'm going to China again

With the same people, I'm off to Shanghai again tonight (or tomorrow morning) at 2am. I'll be back on 11/12.

I may post some photos here if I have the time there.

My new camera phone

I can't believe it. But it is true. I upgraded my mobile phone from the Nokia 3315 which I have been using for 3 years to the SonyEricsson K800i. I got it on Tuesday afternoon, posted straight from Hong Kong, after I bought it off ebay a week ago. Yeah, from winning the bid to getting it takes 7 days. I thought it's alright.

It's bundled with an extra battery, car charger, 512MB M2 memory and a plastic case that makes it looks like it can go underwater. And it is brown colour instead of the normal black.

I'm happy with it so far, the camera is freaking awesome! And it's pretty light too, comsidered it's a 3.2MP Sony Cybershot camera. But the battery only lasted me playing with it for a day and needed to recharge. Recharging takes about 2 hours from 10% to full.

Heaps of features that I haven't got around playing with them yet. But I'm excited and pretty happy with it. :D

Haven't got the software and drivers installed with my computer yet, so I can't judge how good the picture really is on screen, and I can't transfer any songs to it to enjoy yet.

Daylight saving for WA

Western Australia is introducing daylight saving for a trial period commencing December 3, 2006 for 3 years, with the period shown below:

2 a.m. on 3 December 2006 - 2 a.m. on 25 March 2007
2 a.m. on 28 October 2007 - 2 a.m. on 30 March 2008
2 a.m. on 26 October 2008 - 2 a.m. on 29 March 2009

Note: Both the start and end time are specified in standard time, so the end time is 3 am daylight saving time.

So Perth will be 1 hour ahead of Malaysia during daylight saving time. And there'll be more daylight in the evening.

For people in WA, here's a link to fix up your MS Windows system clock.


Update:
Just stumbled upon a post last year that I actually wished for Daylight saving:

It's almost summer now. It's broad daylight by 5:30am! It rather strange to be driving on such a bright day and have very light traffic. W.A should have daylight saving!! Then I can play basketball or go jogging till 8pm and still see. :P
posted by Tzu Yen at 3:50 PM Saturday, November 19, 2005

The 25 Funniest Analogies

Thanks to Phil for the overdose of my daily laughter today.
The 25 Funniest Analogies

I really like the contrast between the serious and elegent language usage the first half and then the analogy that follows which I can totally relate to but just so wrong in the context. Good laugh!

PhD comics vs nick

Haha! This reminds me of Nick's last year Yanchep Talk - You found out someone did the research you're doing and "cry like a baby". Also couple of months ago I got comments from my supervisors that my research results seem like good screen saver, I must be close to finishing based on Nick's talk again. Haha!

Sad truth about Malaysia

My fellow Malaysia countrymen should read this:
While Malaysia fiddles, its opportunities are running dry
by Michael Backman. Thanks Albert for pointing it to me.

Bank bale outs, a formula one racing track, an entire new capital city — Petronas has paid for them all. It's been an orgy of nonsense that Malaysia can ill afford.

Why? Because Malaysia's oil will run out in about 19 years. As it is, Malaysia will become a net oil importer in 2011 — that's just five years away.

So it's in this context that the latest debate about race and wealth is so sad.

It is time to move on, time to prepare the economy for life after oil. But, like Nero fiddling while Rome burned, the Malaysian Government is more interested in stunts like sending a Malaysian into space when Malaysia's inadequate schools could have done with the cash, and arguing about wealth distribution using transparently ridiculous statistics.

That's not Malaysia "boleh", that's Malaysia "bodoh" (stupid).

Update: Michael Backman had a follow up that gives a bit more of context of where he was coming from.
Read here

One twenty is back with new cleaner look

Planet onetwenty is back with new cleaner look. I like it. And finally my blog is rendered properly without all the tags being exposed.

There is a feed that Nick put together as well. Mostly graphics or techy stuffs. I thought PhD comics should make it to the feeds.

What The Bleep Do We Know

I was looking at an email about What The Bleep Do We Know and google ads on the side lured me to these sites:

Know that by which everything else is known. Maharishi University, USA
Maharishi University of Management
Watching What The Bleep Do We Know? Change the world with us on Zaadz!
http://www.zaadz.com/


Interesting sites, but I'm a bit skeptical though. Transcendental Meditation on MUM is interesting. There are good pointers to good enlightening books on zaadz, and movies like Matrix, V for vendetta are among the most liked movies in that community. Cool.

Wikimapia

Danno pointed this out to me. It's really cool! Now the map really comes alive!

And I'm delighted that my search on my hometown Yong Peng returned the correct place. And I quickly added some places I can make out from that birds-eye resolution.

Fantastico!

Extreme Diet Coke & Mentos Experiments II - The Domino Effect

The guys from EepyBird are back, with 251 bottles of Diet Coke and over 1,500 Mentos mints. In Experiment #137, they did a mint-powered version of the Bellagio fountains. This time, it's one giant Coke & Mentos chain reaction that has to be seen to be believed.

See here for the science behind.

Hobart live webcam

Live webcam of Hobart, Tasmania.



Oh, so much memories there.

Are you a pig that can work

I got this funny sms from my girlfriend.

Human = eat + sleep + work + enjoy
Pig = eat + sleep
Human = Pig + work + enjoy
Human - enjoy = Pig + work
Conclusion:
Human who cannot enjoy = Pig that can work

Sadly, I'm a pig that can work most of the time, and a human sometimes. :(

You've better not do evil

I've been slowly moving my online activities into Google:

Personalised Homepage with tools like To do list and games like Bejeweled and Color Junction. Calendar, Picasa photo album, recently I started using Alert, RSS Reader and Notebook.
All of these, let alone Gmail which was the very first thing I fall in love with Google, makes me wonder about how safe it is to put all eggs in one basket, though the basket seems iron solid and reliable now.

At-Call Savings rate 6.6%

Stumbled upon this page and found that BankWest has the best rate of at-call saving account, a whooping 6.60% introductory rate for a year.

Some of my money will flow there. Haha!

INFOCHOICE | Banking | At-Call Savings

Google Alert picks up Malaysian in Perth

Google Alert is cool. I started using it a while ago and it picks up some new things about Malaysia+Perth
on the internet which I won't search regularly myself. Here's one of them.

Flight 720 - Malaysia - Brindha Sithambarnathan :: ABC Perth

Perth Royal Show

I went to see the Honda Asimo humanoid robot at the Perth Royal Show on the last day. Very impressive robot. But I find real human are still way more interesting than robots.

People of Perth Royal Show 2006

Oct 6, 2006 - 12 Photos

TT's origami gallery

Cool Origami gallery:
TT's origami gallery

And how to fold them here:
TT's Origami Page

Some CG of origami folding too here:
Smooth Origami Animation by Crease Line Adjustment

The Kongmoon Rice Stick!

There's a picture of the Kongmoon Rice Stick (江门排粉 or beehoon as Malaysians call it) features on Greenpeace website saying that the rice they use to make this rice stick is dangerous as it's experimentally Genetically Engineered (GE)!
I had made beehoon soup at home last week. It was nice. Let me know if you see a third arm growing out from my back, ok?


Month in pictures: September 2006 | Greenpeace Australia Pacific

Something not quite right of UWA clock face

See if you can see what's wrong with it.

(Hint: They might have ran out of letter 'V' at the time of construction.)

Professional Development Lectures for Research Students

Professional Development Lectures for Research Students now available online at Graduate Research School - Current Students

Places to Eat at Nick

Nick's guide to places to Eat in Perth

I'm back in Perth

Perth - Singapore - Shanghai - Suzhou - Shanghai - Shenzhen - Shanghai - Singapore - Kuala Lumpur - Singapore - Perth

I'm now back in Perth again.

The length and urgency of my to do list don't look very good at the moment. So, there may be some lag till I catch up on the last couple of days log in China and the family reunion in KL and gathering in Singapore.

China Day 5: ShenZhen

We took a domestic flight to Shenzhen (深圳) this morning at 8am. We reached Shenzhen at 10am+ and then took a taxi to the hotel to check in. The taxi driver (the locals called them shifu(师傅)) seems like a reasonable and nice guy. I had a good chat with him on the way and he drive with good manner.

Opps. Battery low! Gotta switch off.

China Day 4: Shanghai Sightseeing

Had a morning of free time before we head down to do more scary business negotiations. We went to ChengHuang temple (城隍庙) area for some shopping and had the famous xiaolong bun (南翔蟹黄小笼包) and soup bun (灌汤包).





At night we went back to the hotel restaurant for dinner again and I checked out the toilet which I get entertained by Jolin Tsai (蔡依林)'s karaoke MTV.

China Day 3: Shanghai Oriental Pearl Tower

Heaps of heated negotiation today. Scary business stuffs. It was at the government research center and the lunch was like those in military service. And we were 'privileged' enough to sit in the military personnel room (军人室), the food are ok, but the presentation was very different compared to other meals we had in those posh VIP. But the watermelon was impressive. Very sweet and fine, and even the usual white part close to the skin are very nice. :D~
And also we were offered bottled water that the astronauts drink. :P


We had dinner back in the hotel in a posh VIP room. Hugh table and golden cutlery.


But the highlight of the day was a tour to the Oriental Pearl Tower. We went through the whole thing - the middle deck, the top 'space cabin' (350m) and the Shanghai development museum. Very nice view of the whole shanghai night light. It's so huge that it's all buildings as far as the horizon can be seen. And the musuem has a very detail re-presentation of Shanghai of different time. Very very nice, but we were running late to the musuem part and were rushing through the whole thing....



Also, I got a good picture of the nine dragon pole on the 5-level highway. I was told that there were a myth: The location of the pole was the dragon neck in fengshui as told by a chief monk of a temple after repeated failure to drill the piling into that location. Then the monk finally revealed a specific time and method to drill and it was successful after that but the monk died straight after due to the revelation of heavenly secret. Nine dragons statue was put on as part of the solution by the monk.

China Day 2: Suzhou

Today itenarary is to Suzhou(苏州).

8:30am Breakfast at the Sichuan 四川 restaurant at the hotel. Buns, congee (皮蛋瘦肉粥) and some small dishes. Hot and peppery. And some freshly made noodle (担担面) too. The people working in the restaurant are all very young and doesn't seem very well trained. Haha! And they keep smiling with shyness.


9am+ Got on the van and headed to Suzhou. Saw quite some stuffs on the way. Lots of electric bicycles, tricycle taxis, five-level Highway with nine dragon scupture on the center pole, lots of huge advertisement boards, etc. The pity is I didn't get many good photo of all these as I'm in the car and the glass is not very clean. Haha！

11am+ we reached the factory and had some exchange. And the water they provide is from Nestle.


After the factory tour, it's LUNCH!! Yeah! We went to SongHe Restaurant (松鹤楼) on the historical ShanTang Street (山塘街). The food are very nice. Small portion of many many dishes without the scary super expensive stuffs. Ha!




Outside our room in the restaurant. Very Suzhou look.


Gui Fish 桂鱼


Chicken Head Rice 鸡头米


little lake trout 小塘鲤鱼


Sugar vinegar white raddish 糖醋萝卜



After the lunch, we had some 20 mins to walk on the historical street.
Me on the ShanTang Street


Water way and boat


Theatre

Then we had a long drive back to Shanghai. Had another long and exhausting meeting in a cafe called 上岛咖啡厅. By the time the meeting is done, it's almost 9pm. Everyone was rather tired but still not hungry because of the late lunch and finger food. So we all went back to hotel and rest. I managed to borrow my boss's laptop to check email and blog about this.

Tomorrow morning breakfast at 7:30am. Then some big negotiation are awaiting. Big day tomorrow! Stay tune. Hope I'll have time tomorrow night too.

China Day 1: Shanghai

I'm in Shanghai(上海)!!!!!! Unreal!

Pearl Tower (明珠塔)

Shanghai airport is huge! And the city is a mix of old and modern. Big highway with bicycles on it. :P

The China people are nice to us. They insisted to order shark fin soup after we order some very specials dishes and declined the shark fin openly. I killed a small shark today. But the soup is really really nice, so thick and yummy. It's not anythin like the sharkfin soup we have at wedding... it's one bowl each separately with candle at the bottom... And the restaurant is at the side of the Huang Pu river(黄浦江). Superb view of both side of the river night light...


The hotel is beauiful too, called DongHai Hotel 东海宾馆. We stayed at the top floor, great far away view, but looking directly down is not very good, messy rof top of flats. About RMB470 a night. The workers in the hotels are nice but not very experienced let alone professional. Lots of young cute girls everywhere... :P Probably all concentrated at these high class places...



Gotta sleep. Good night.

I'm going to Shanghai!!

Going to Shanghai for a week helping a company do translation. Yeah!!

Cape Telecoms Limited

I'm in the news

I went to Applecross Primary School last week to do a presentation for the Computer science school. And the Melville Times had a photographer over and picked up the news.

Busy weekends

I've been really busy for the past week or so and will continue to be very busy for the next couple of weeks or so.

Last weekends was pretty full. I went to a comedy night sponsored by my housemate's Deloite social club. It's the Big Hooha at Brisbane Hotel on Saturday night. That was the first time I've been to a live comedy. I have to say that they are very fast, creative and well-expressed.

There are 6 guys and 2 gals in the team - one is sort of the MC, two teams each has 2 guys 1 gal and one guy is at the back with a keyboard and music effect.
It was really funny! They can express whatever with no or very little props and the audience can still make out what they are trying to play as. And many little games they played on stage are ad hoc, getting a word from the audience and come out with stuffs within seconds. Pretty amazing talent. So I really enjoyed it. :D


Then Sunday was the UWA EXPO. I was helping up at CS school with photographing and at the vision lab. Here are the photos of UWA EXPO @ CSSE, also featured on the The Wonderful World of Computer Science page. I managed to sneak in to one of the photo I took. Hehehe!

photos of UWA EXPO @ CSSE.

Then after I finished my duty at uni, I rushed off with friends to the AMWA Malaysian community food fair for Charity. Here's some photos featured on AMWA website.

AMWA Community Food Fair for Charity.

Demolition of school

You may have listened to this hilarious Irish kid Becky's proposal to knock her school down. If you haven't, here it is:
Demolition Becky

At UWA, we have some real demolition going on at the old Chemistry building enar the guild. I only managed to took some shots before it's all cleaned up. I didn't have my camera with me when it was actually being knocked down bits by bits.

Digital beautification

If you like the look of Charlize Theron in real life than in the film Monster, here's your digital savior:

Digital Face Beautification
Or do they really mean beatification as the page title reads??

Beware of those photos you see on dating websites! Haha!

Apple OS X Leopard, amazingly Cool!

I just watched the opening keynote speech of Apple CEO Steve job's at WWDC 2006. The preview into their new OS X Leopard is really blowing me away! Now that you can run MS Windows under apple machine when you really need it, there is less resistance to switch over to Mac with such a great user experience.

Watch it at here:
Apple CEO Steve job's keynote speech at WWDC 2006

MALAYSIA CENTRAL: Mycen Blog Directory: Malaysian Online Blogs

MALAYSIA CENTRAL: Mycen Blog Directory: Malaysian Online Journals, Weblogs, Themed Blog, Blogs, Bloggers, Blogging

Rafidah Aziz in Perth

I heard from AMWA committee awhile ago that Rafidah Aziz, the International Trade and Industry Minister of Malaysia is coming to Perth for some trade mission. I didn't realise it's today. But Robin Wong somehow got in to have an afternoon with Rafidah Aziz.
Again, another example of "it's who you know, not what you know that gets you to places". Malaysia is especially good at it!

Robin did a good job as a blogger to document the event from his perspective. So at least he may justify the lunch paid by taxpayer's money with his detailed article.

I'm still wondering how the news about these goodies gets channelled out to the connected luckies? Can somebody tell me?

My poor car has a tough time again

Bad news this morning. The back of my car got crashed this morning!
I parked on the road side and there wasn't much space between the road and where I parked so the guy didn't allow enough room and crashed into it. The car was even displaced so it's at an angle to the road when I saw it.

When Derong told me about it, there was no one there already. So I thought it'll be a major money drain to fix up the boot cover, the bumper and the back light cover. But after 15 mins inspection of the car, just before we left, I found a small piece of paper stuck in the hole of the torn metal. He was nice enough to left his name and contact for me, not like last time.

So I spent an hour+ talking to him getting his insurance details, calling up insurance company and stuff.. Need to get a quote for the repair tomorrow and all those troubles... At least I don't have to pay for it.

David Suzuki is coming to Perth!!!

DAVID SUZUKI: CHALLENGES FOR THE 21ST CENTURY - FAREWELL TOUR (065103)

Mon 7.30-9pm Sep 18
David Suzuki has published 32 books including the most widely used genetics textbook in the United States. In addition to scholarly and popular works on genetics, he has written extensively about ecology, technology, the future and his own life. To all of his writing, David brings his gift for exploring and sharing complex ideas with clarity and passion. Don't miss this opportunity to hear David speak in Perth on his farewell tour of Australia.

Biologists inform us that human beings appeared on earth about 150,000 years ago on the savannahs of Africa. Compared to the other animals that shared the plains with us, we were not impressive in numbers, size, speed, strength or sensory acuity. Our survival attribute was the most complex structure in the known universe, the human brain that endowed us with immense memory, curiosity and creativity. It invented the concept of "future" and thus was the only animal that realized we could shape the future by our actions in the present. Foresight, looking ahead, recognizing opportunities and hazards and choosing accordingly was a strategy that more than compensated for our physical and sensory deficits. We have become the most numerous mammal on the planet and supplemented by technology, consumptive demand and global economics, we have become a new kind of force, altering the physical, chemical and biological features of the planet on a geological scale as no other species ever has. Now we have all the amplified predictive capacity of scientists, supercomputers, engineers and telecommunications and for over 40 years, the leading scientists of the world have been telling us we are headed down a dangerous path - altering the atmosphere, poisoning earth, air and water, deforesting the planet, extinguishing species and so on. The disaster that hurricane Katrina wreaked on New Orleans had been warned of for years, but now we are ignoring the very strategy for survival and ignoring these warnings. Why are we turning our backs on our most important ability and what can we do about it? David Suzuki will discuss the answers to these urgent questions.

Click here to register.

He came to Perth 2 years ago, I didn't know who he was. And when we decided to check it out, the tickets were sold out. This year I will be there.
My ex-housemate Kaz left several of his books - "Good news for a change", "from Naked ape to Super species" and "The scared balance" - which I am still slowly munching through. His vision and research into sustainable future is really inspiring.

Malaysian Community Food Fair for Charity

Date: 20 August 2006
Time: 11am-3pm
Venue: Queens Park Recreation Center
Centre St. (Cnr George St), Queens Park WA 6107
Food: Halal and non-halal food donated by restaurants and home mama.

We already have $7000 worth of food, now want to get people to come and eat them. :D The voucher is $10 a booklet (inc. $5 for main, $2x2 for kueh and $1 for drink) and you can get them from me.

Current Food list: Hold your saliva!!
100 Nasi Lemak
300 Penang Laksa
50 Beef Rendang
100 Vegetarian Loh Mai Kai
18 Fried Chicken drum stick.
100 Fish Balls/Meat Balls/Crab Stick
50 Curry Chicken
50 Beef Rendang
50 Fried Rice
200 Mee Goreng
30 Fried Hokkien Mee
100 Fried Kuih Tew
100 Nasi Birani
100 Matabah
300 Satay
100 A Char
500 Curry Puff
100 Hum Chim Peng
200 BBQ Buns
30 Asian muffins
100 spring roll
Yum Kuih
Sri Muka
Kuih Talam

Fund raised will go to:
Silver Jubilee Home for the Aged Penang, Malaysia
Jalan Sungai Dua, 11700 Penang, Malaysia
Currently house 220 residents. It provides homes for destitute Malaysian with ages of 60 years and above, free of charge so that they have a place to call home.

Supported by Association of Malaysians in Western Australia (AMWA), more information on AMWA website: amwa.org.au

Come along for a good feast, meet some nice Malaysians and do a good cause. I've got vouchers with me.

Photo Tourism

Photo Tourism

Danno told me about it. Really cool stuffs! From Szeliski and Seitz's group again. And they use David Lowe's descriptor to get the correspondances. I shall really look at Lowe's magic discriptor and cash it on my research too. :P

Serious system crash

My home PC crashed again!

I usually hibernate my system every night when I go to bed so it'll wake up faster the next day. The last reboot I did was after the ZoneAlarm problem.
My Firefox can't connect to internet properly yesterday morning, so I decided to give it a reboot. But it kept coming back to the screen asking me to choose SafeMode or Normal Boot. And the normal boot will stop after the WinXP splash screen came up for a while then a blue screen showed up for half a second and then reboot itself and brought me back to the choosing Safemode/Mornal boot screen.

I managed to take a photo of the blue screen and it has

Technical information:
**STOP: 0x0000007E (0xC00000??,

The "??," are gibberish that I cannot make out, seems like it rebooted before it showed everything.

I could still get into safemode (without Network support) and back up whatever I want to back up. And I thought I'd just reinstall the OS.

But the real scary thing is after I changed the Boot priority to "Boot from CD" and nothing else, and rebooted with my XP CD in the CDROM. It gave me an Error of "System Halted" on a black screen. So I cannot even boot from CD!!!

Seems like this time is a big one! Can anyone shed some light on what may go wrong?
My system is probably 4-5 years old now. Don't just die like that, please!!

I hope it's not Horatio trying to straighten things up and I stuffed it up again...

Amazing 11 year old girl singing

The voice is unbelieveable!

Amazing 11 year old girl singing
Or download it straight from here.

You think you're thinking by yourself?!

I read an article recommended by an old friend titled
THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION: WHY AMERICANS WILL BELIEVE ALMOST ANYTHING by Tim O'Shea.
It's quite a long article but I learnt a lot from it. It discusses about how the mass media and our everyday life perception are largely products of PR-industry to create a public perception about some idea or product. I include some parts of the article that I found worth thinking seriously about:

The father of Spin -- Edward Bernays who described

the public is a 'herd that needed to be led.' And this herdlike thinking makes people "susceptible to leadership." Bernays never deviated from his fundamental axiom to "control the masses without their knowing it." The best PR happens with the people unaware that they are being manipulated.

In Bernays' Propaganda:

"Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our lives whether in the sphere of politics or business in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind."

A tad different from Thomas Jefferson's view on the subject:

"I know of no safe depository of the ultimate power of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise that control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not take it from them, but to inform their discretion."

It also talks about how scientific research are controlled by big corporations.

JUNK SCIENCE

In 1993 a guy named Peter Huber wrote a new book and coined a new term. The book was Galileo's Revenge and the term was junk science . Huber's shallow thesis was that real science supports technology, industry, and progress. Anything else was suddenly junk science. Not surprisingly, Stauber explains how Huber's book was supported by the industry-backed Manhattan Institute.

Huber's book was generally dismissed not only because it was so poorly written, but because it failed to realize one fact: true scientific research begins with no conclusions. Real scientists are seeking the truth because they do not yet know what the truth is.

True scientific method goes like this:

1. form a hypothesis
2. make predictions for that hypothesis
3. test the predictions
4. reject or revise the hypothesis based on the research findings

THE REAL JUNK SCIENCE

Contrast this with modern PR and its constant pretensions to sound science. Corporate sponsored research, whether it's in the area of drugs, GM foods, or chemistry begins with predetermined conclusions. It is the job of the scientists then to prove that these conclusions are true, because of the economic upside that proof will bring to the industries paying for that research. This invidious approach to science has shifted the entire focus of research in America during the past 50 years, as any true scientist is likely to admit. If a drug company is spending 10 million dollars on a research project to prove the viability of some new drug, and the preliminary results start coming back about the dangers of that drug, what happens? Right. No more funding. The well dries up. What is being promoted under such a system? Science? Or rather Entrenched Medical Error?"

THE TWO MAIN TARGETS OF "SOUND SCIENCE"
It is shocking when Stauber shows how the vast majority of corporate PR today opposes any research that seeks to protect
* public health
* the environment

A lot of the claims are cited on
Stauber & Rampton, "Trust Us, We're Experts", Tarcher/Putnam 2001

It shall be a good enlightening read too.

Bloody Zone Alarm!!

Last night, when I turned on my computer, there was a little reminder that a new version of Zone Alarm is available and asked if I wanted to update it. So I did the usual thing, no problem, update it since ZA has been a great firewall for me.

But it turned out to be a disaster that took me 4 hours to revert and still didn't know why!

The update didn't work, and somehow I have no permission to either run it or kill it! And it blocked out my internet!!! Then it's a long series of search on internet after uninstalling it.

Then re-downloaded it, re-installed it, reboot, didn't work, clean-uninstalled it, reboot, re-re-installed it, reboot, still didn't work, tried again re-clean-uninstalled it, reboot, re-re-re-installed it, reboot, still bloody didn't work, re-re-clean-uninstalled it, found more detail information, follow some lengthy instructions, cleaned registry, deleted files, reboot into safe mode, deleted more files, reboot into normal mode, re-re-downloaded it, re-re-re-installed it, reboot, still freaking didn't work!!!

At my despair, I decided to not use it any more. So I re-re-re-clean-uninstalled it, reboot, and with the guts feeling of having messed around with the I decided to do a system restore back to before all these mess.

So I did a system restore back to Thursday, another reboot and to my astonishment, the little [Z|A] icon showed up on my system tray! So back to square one, with 4 hours of hope and frustration well rewarded...

What firewall do you use? Is there an alternative to the free and yet powerful ZoneAlarm? Hope it doesn't give me problem anymore....


Oh, a side story. When I was panicking about the firewall being turned off for update and eventually malfunction, I was simultaneously checking on other things on the net. And one of them was the online Chinese radio from Malaysia - WAONLINE, and somehow their frontpage got hacked (http://www.waonline.com.my) see hacked screenshot here. But I wasn't sure and thought could it be my firefox got hijacked!! And had a good paranoid!


I'm glad that the disaster is over. :```)

Super Deformed on Planet OneTwenty

Yesterday, I blogged about Onetwenty picked up the Horatio feed, today, there's a new look on
Planet OneTwenty with the super deformed cartoon shape of the bloggers. Haha! Those cute avatars I made for the 60Hz home made game GOMM are just so funny! Thanks for the cooperation from everyone who posed for it. :D

Planet onetwenty is fast!

Soon after I blogged about Horatio's hilarious blog, planet onetwenty picked it up and it's now included in their feeds. Good job Jim!

Another nice combination

I missed this one today. Well, take the pm off, there's another chance soon.

07:06:07 06/07/06

Another fun date will come in 3 days

This time it's better for those who don't wake up early.

11:10:09 08/07/06

But it's not as elegent as several beautiful date-time combination that happened in the past couple of months.

01:02:03   04/05/06
06:06:06   06/06/06
  20:06   20/06/2006

Horatio invades the virtual space

The super Horatio figure that used to fly around CS in my early years here is invading the virtual space now. Of course, it's from its original creator, the almighty Danno!

He's also trying to confuse my possible internet fans with this very similar URL:
http://tzu-yen.blogspot.com/

I took a screenshot of that page at 15:00WST 04/07/2006 for archiving purpose.


I like this joke. Good one Danno!