Bubbles Macro

"Bubble" Tea
Originally uploaded by IonBuck.

Noticed these nice bubbles... actually, I really only noticed the big bubble... right after someone poured the Chinese tea into my cup. I've just got to snap this and so I did. :)

Sand Dams, the miracle that I've only now heard of...

The kinds of dams that most people reading this blog and myself know are megastructures that require flooding a lot of places with abundant water. Sand dams, however, are really different and I've only heard of this from a Treehugger article.

These dams consist of low concrete walls about 3 to 16 feet high, across small rivers that stop flowing during the dry season. Sand from erosion during the wet season will collect behind these walls and act as sponges, storing up to 40% of water which will proof useful to the locals during the dry season. These may sound primitive and low tech to some but I would think this is actually an intelligent way of harvesting water with minimum damages to the environment. A miracle indeed, especially, for nations like Africa.

The article and the video below also mentioned the amount of conservation work to reverse the effects of global warming in Africa compared to loud mouth world leading countries. Trees were planted over the course of 25 years and the effect of increased precipitation is becoming evident with a more productive ecosystem in the making.

via Treehugger.

Smartphones, Dumb Thoughts 2

After recovering from an outburst of smartphone lust, I am now back again with those thoughts. This time, it stemmed from my attempt to get some reading materials to fit into my ancient PDA for use during my endless graveyard shifts. It all began last night... or was it the night before (I am starting to realise that night shifts have the same effects of too much time travel)?

I was surfing the net looking for reading materials that could last me through the wee hours of morning and found some so I converted them to PDF with this really cool PDFCreator (which incidentally is free). At that point in time, I was praising my intelligence in being able to think of such a thing. Who would want to bring newspapers, magazines or books around to read these days, right? Ahem, that is another story.

Anyway, I continued my brilliant idea by further transferring these PDF files to my ancient PDA with a screen size of 240x320 or 320x240 (depending how you want to hold it). Brought it to the work place and after much stress in organising stuffs and listening to advise and 'advise', I sat down for some electronic reading. Aaah... clicked on one of the files and mobile Adobe Reader launched.

Clicked on the "a" icon so that Adobe can help judge to display the best text size for reading. And then, I realised that screen resolution IS and will ALWAYS be important. We need to be really greedy for screen resolution. 320x240 is simply not adequate. I needed to pan the stuff from left to right and right to left after reading halfway of EVERY sentence. Did I tell you that I got dizzy after 20 minutes of Cloverfield and had to leave? No? Check out my bud and my experience here.

Thankfully, I was too damn confused with the timeline and lack of sleep that I did not feel dizzy with the panning this time around. I laboured through one article. But this is reason enough for me to make a sequel to the first Smartphones, Dumb Thoughts... While the devil in me is tempted to go out and just purchase a Nokia E72, this very problem of screen resolution asset is holding me back. To what end will it last? When will I be able to find a balance between an affordable and big resolution smartphone?

I reckon this issue would never have come up if those blardy phone manufacturers could ONLY make phones that are just phones. I hold you all responsible for this unnecessary stress occupying my limited grey matter!

Large Hadron Collider ready to restart - The Big Picture - Boston.com

It is interesting to note that our doomsday machine is really this complicated. I still couldn't imagine how a lot of people managed to build this when in my job, it is so hard to get everyone to agree on just a design. HMPH! But no worries. The doomsday machine is gonna expedite 2012 to some time really soon.
Large Hadron Collider ready to restart - The Big Picture - Boston.com

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Light Freeze

Scientists are at it again, this time feeding some light sensitive chemicals into transparent worms. Once exposed to ultraviolet light, the chemicals turn blue and the worms will cease to move. A burst of normal light later, the worms are back in action again. What sounded like humans trying their hands at being God actually had more noble intentions.

The scientists hope to be able to develop drugs that can be switched on and off by light for humans. The drugs can be distributed evenly throughout the body and be activated (and deactivated) only at the intended location by shining the light with the appropriate wavelength.

via National Geographic News.

I think I will give this a miracles tag.

@#%$ Monday!!!

Mondays are bad, we all know that but this one is exceptionally bad! Began the day with stressful problems that required running here and there, calling this and that, phone calls streaming in from left, right, center, and found out about something important involving external parties that was not communicated. I think tonight I will be dreaming about some of these, too.

Gosh. If this is a sampling of what's to come, I'd be totally burn out in no time. I will be shouting goodbye cruel world and, hopefully, land on some really evil baddy's head who will break my fall.

Good thing that there's this blog here which I can voice it all out. Now I am feeling a tad better. Aaah... deep breath, deep breath. Oh, lunch time is near. Goody.

Blardy Queue Jumping Car

This is happening a lot lately. My last post about this kind of shit was some months back and it so happened yesterday that everything was well and safe to take out the mobile phone and snap this #%$#@:

Ingenious Smart Eaters

Yup. This is how most of us smart people eat. We gobble and then we stop when there's only one piece of the stuff left.

Ada Air Kah? Got Water Or Not?

Dear fellow blog readers from Selangor, Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya,

While checking out SYABAS' website for water disruption in my area, I found out that SYABAS (Syarikat Bekalan Air Selangor Sdn. Bhd.), through its PUSPEL customer service thing (correct me if I'm wrong because I really don't know what PUSPEL means but from the website, it seems to be customer service), actually provide tweet updates of water related issues in the above areas.

Fascinating.

ps. Here's their Twitter site: http://twitter.com/puspel <<<<< Embarrassing of me to have forgotten to include this link on my first post.

So much bad luck...

Did you know that (besides the usual suspects)

• putting your left foot on the floor after waking up from bed (???),
• walking under a ladder,
• spilling salt (!!!),
• opening an umbrella indoors,
• leaving your purse on the floor (?!?),
• seeing an owl during the day,
• dropping a knife and picking it up (!?!) and
• placing a hat on the bed

all contribute to bad luck? No wonder our world will end at the end of 2012.

Digital Camera Innovation - Modular Ricoh GXR

Thought Micro Four Thirds would be the only technological innovation for digital interchangeable lens cameras? Not anymore. There's a leak about Ricoh's upcoming modular digital camera where the whole lens-cum-sensor is interchangeable. In the following video, the dude changed from a 24-70mm lens with a 10 megapixels CCD sensor capable of only recording VGA video to a 50mm macro lens with 12.3 megapixels CMOS sensor that could record in HD! Another advantage will be dust free despite many change overs. Rumours of rumours say that Ricoh also plan to attach a printer and/or a projector so that the body itself could print and/or project without any lens and sensor.

And if you think it's expensive, you are right! The camera body retails for US$703, while the macro and zoom lens + sensors cost US$1,004 and US$502, respectively. Innovation sometimes come at a price... in the beginning, at least.

via Crave.

Musical Fountain Galore in Dubai

This could yet be the best musical fountain I've ever seen... not that I've seen many... in fact, I don't remember seeing one... but yeah, this is the best yet. And interestingly, it was filmed using a professional Canon DSLR - the 5D MkII. The clarity of the video was great. The best got better halfway through. Enjoy. :)

via Dark Roasted Blend.

Taylor Swift and President Barack Obama - Motions Captured!

I should be sleeping but because my body is tuned to working the graveyard shift, I am still here blogging... something which I've not been doing much lately. I think it could be the Bad Ass Coffee working or it could be the long, deep sleep I had for the most part of yesterday.

I'm proud to say that I've found a rare similarity between Taylor Swift and President Barack Obama - they both got fitted with billions of motion sensors on their bodies:

President Obama photo via the ONION.

The Inglorious Bad Ass Basterds

At last, after a long lapse of movie-less weekends, tonight I managed to catch Inglourious Basterds with my buds and I was quite impressed with the movie. In fact, I've always been impressed with Quentin Tarantino movies. My favourite one is in fact the one with him in it, with a hole in his hand. I went in to watch the movie expecting the usual kind of ending (spoiler ahead, skip the red italics if you don't want your movie experience to be a potong steam one) that one would expect of attempts to kill the Fuhrer but came out pleasantly surprised.

Coincidentally, as if basterds is not vulgar enough we had some Bad Ass Coffee before the movie and that, too, was quite impressive:
Quite a masterpiece of a night, actually. :)

The Need for Handsfree

To start off this post, I would like to share with you my experience in the male toilet earlier today. As I went in, I saw a bloke skilfully balancing an opened laptop with his left hand while at the same time (I assumed as I did not go any nearer to investigate this matter) holding his wee wee with his right hand at the urinal. Besides proof that he is right handed (I learnt this from the movie Gattaca), it is also obvious why there are articles that say keyboards (in this case, the laptop keyboard) have plenty more germs than a toilet seat.

If he had to work while peeing, obviously, plenty of us would need to Google hands-free style. The brilliant people at Google Mobile have just the solution for us all - voice recognition search:

Very gently, 吃香蕉

I used Google translator to translate the above title using the English version of eat banana. And people, don't laugh, this is my not very successful attempt in making a couple of bananas with Blender:
Initially, it was a white background but that didn't work out. Did the texture myself with Gimp. Ok, ok, you can stop laughing now. HMPH! YAK CHIU!

J. Co Goes Pop

Accidentally discovered something new while passing by J. Co donuts - the J. Pops baby donuts:
There are 12 flavours, 2 each and cost RM17.15 before tax. I was expecting all of them to be sweet but nope - some are salty. I must say, I didn't like all of them. I did not even know which flavour was which. :P