Dang, my newly purchased mobile phone keeps on hanging. I can’t really pinpoint exactly where and how it happens. It seems to hang randomly but most of the time, when I try to enter to the menu page. Yes, I have recently just upgraded the firmware (it just came out officially) for the E51 Nokia phone but it still hangs. But after upgrading the firmware, it seems to happen less frequently though. Well, better than nothing right?

The thing I hate most about these new phones is that althought they have tons of features, they are usually not stable. In the past, my mobile phones never once hang for over 2 years of use. They were basic phones. My first phone can’t even recieve MMS. I guess when you start adding features into the phone, the coding becomes complicated and there will certainly be more bugs in the coding. However, I think that they should always iron out the bugs and problems of their products before it is being sold to the public. Upgrading their mobile phone’s firmware can be tedious to some. But perhaps due to the competitive nature of the mobile market, we are seeing products being launched even before it is actually ready for use by the public. And worse of all, a lot of such companies refuse to even solve the problems in their mobile phone’s software.

Take a look at this article.

Isn’t that cool? Now why didn’t I think of that? Won’t it be something if one day we could have a bacteria that eats waste products and then excrete crude oil! We could possible solve the world’s problems! I mean wars have been fought for the control of crude oil and we all know the importance of that black oil. Well, if you don’t, you actually use it everyday. Not exactly it, but a refined version of crude oil which you can use to power the PC you are running now, or that car you are going to drive later. Yes, that’s from Crude Oil. You process it so that it becomes petrol for your car.

And the best of all, they are started on it. They have a bug which can eat up wood chips or wheat straw and these bugs later excrete crude oil.  I guess this is what they call “renewable petroleum”? The process is exactly like what you do when you brew beer. You need a yeast strain which can convert food (carbon) to petroleum.Basically, you leave the yeast eat the food and it turn it converts the food to petroleum. When you brew beer, the yeats turns the sugars to alcohol. Petrolem is “very much” like alcohol, so I guess what they did was the engineer or modify the yeast till it can accomplish that. Well, that means that soon we will be seeing home brewed Crude Oil. Don’t need to get crude oil from the local sheik, just brew them yourselves with the leftover woodchips or wheat straw. But what can we do with Crude oil which is not refined?

I hope that one day, they won’t modify the yeast till it eats human flesh and excrete crude oil. It could be very devastating to the human race on the whole. However,if they somehow managed to modify the yeast till it eats stupid or brainless humans and excrete crude oil, then I think it is a very good accomplishment.

It may seem to you that I have been spending a lot of my time on this blog complaining about the weather in Singapore. Well, yes I have. The problem is that it is back again - the extremely warm weather in Singapore! And worse of all, it never seems to end. We got some very warm weather just about 2 months ago and now it has come back. Sure, Singapore is a tropical country and it is warm the year throughout. I don’t mind warm, but the weather is terribly hot. After I get out of the shower, I immediately start to sweat like a pig. And if I don’t switch on the air-conditioner, my room feels like an oven and I can’t do any work. Seriously, the weather is starting to get much warmer every year. I am sure I didn’t feel it as warm last year or the year before. Looks like global warming is truly going to get all of us into trouble.

If you go outside, you can certainly feel the oppressive heat everywhere in Singapore. The only escape is the shopping malls and of course the swimming pools and other air-conditioned places. I guess that is why Singaporeans are so hooked on shopping and spending money. They have no other choice to escape the heat! Even if you take our supposedly air-conditioned buses, you can feel that the air-conditioner is blowing warm water. Sitting inside the bus in the afternoon is exactly like sitting inside my room, it’s blazingly hot and unbearable. And it’s going to get worse as the months of July and August will be even warmer.

Take a look here.

This new type of memory is called Programmable Metallization Cell (PMC) and it makes use of nanotechnology for storage. Just imagine you can store 1TB of information on your thumbdrive. And the best thing is that it will come in just a few years. This is definitely good news for people who needs portable storage on the go but worry about the power and fragility of their storage devices. I am of course assuming that this new type of storage will be just like our current thumbdrives which is rather easy to carry, takes up very little space and uses very little power. Currently our latest thumbdrives can only store up to maybe about 32GB of storage and it is very expensive. In fact, I doubt you can find any of such thumbdrives in the customer market.

But what this new Solid State memory promises is that it will not only store massive information, it will also be cheap and easy to produce. Good news for all of us. No need for bulky harddisk even for our laptops and could be on par with the harddisk when we compare the price as well.

Well, I guess we will all have to wait and see whether it will all work out for us. Let’s keep our fingers cross that it does.

Well, it’s that day of the year again when we see a large number of students going back to school after their one month long break. I am sure that there are also a number of students who are not keen on going back to school. But surprisingly, there are also a number who can’t wait to return. During my time, I dreaded going to school. So the holidays were the best time of the school year. No teachers telling you to do this or do that, no school bullies pushing you around, no homework to do, no waking up early to catch the school bus and no time table to follow. In other words, freedom! Yes, we all love freedom. You can do whatever you want. Of course, in Singapore we most likely will see a very different scenario. I am not sure what went wrong and when did it all go wrong, but it seems to me that nowadays Singaporean parents just love to send their children to tuition centres, art classes, drama classes, acting school, computer courses and so on. Worse of all, their school holidays are just spent in these classes! Crazy. Parents should give their children a little break now and then. Overwhelming them just don’t cut it anymore. And it is ultimately counter-productive when your children becomes overwhelmed with information which they cannot handle and start to lose focus. And it also depends on individually how the child handles this kind of stress. If they break down, that’s going to be difficult for someone to walk away from. I have seen a lot of such cases and in a hyper-competitive Singapore, it is just going to get worse.

Probably, In my opinion, the main problem lies with the parents. The truth is Singaporean parents are just full of themselves and they are a selfish lot. Sending their children to so many tuition centres or art classes won’t really help their children, but what it does is gives the parents free time to do what they want. I am very sure that they know that. It is much easier to “pass” their parenting duties to someone else, so why not someone from a tuition centre where they can then claim that it is actually helping them? I know parenting is a very tiring job. It’s still a choice. But if you want to be a parent, then by god, you should do it yourself even if you can’t completely do it. Don’t pass the bucket just because it is convenient.

Well, officially that the speeds advertized did not change but the overall speeds for the Starhub network seemed to have greatly improved. I am on Starhub MOL Premium, which had a lot of problems previously. Nowadays when surfing the Internet, it feels much faster than before. No more lagging and frustrating waits for the site to download completely. Don’t you just hate it when only the title appears while the rest of the page doesn’t even load when you are surfing? I really hate it especially when you don’t know when the page will actually load finish and you just sit there like a fool waiting.

However, I guess this speed improvement could be due to the PC Show which happened only recently. It seems to me that Starhub speeds improve only before and after such big computer shows. And in between, we get very sluggish network speeds from Starhub. I believe that the purpose is to attract new customers to their broadband plans. Well, I will have to wait and see whether this is true. I will get back to you guys whether the speeds is crappy in just about 2-3 weeks time. I won’t keep my fingers cross if I were you. Starhub has not always been what I would call “forthcoming” with their actions and they do have a lot of tricks up their sleeves. This should be one of them.

I have been complaining about the slow speeds for a while now and there was not a single positive response from them. Everytime you phone them, they claimed that it’s due to the website’s server or that they don’t have any problems from their end. They even claimed that it is due to people downloading and saturating the entire network. That’s just plain dumb since they have advertised their speeds as such, yet cannot fulfil what they had promised.

Good news everyone, it looks like we may soon have the likes of an Universal Power Adapter. This means that you don’t need a ton of adaptors for your individual notebooks, mobile phones, mp3 players or anything that requires an external power source or charger. Won’t it be great if one day, you just need a single adaptor for your electronic devices everywhere you go? No longer will you forget to bring one adaptor for your mobile phone or the other adapter for your PDA phone, it’s going to be universal! Well, that is if everyone (those big multi-national manufacturers) agrees on this.

I am sure that if you had purchased an extra adapter before, let’s say for your notebook, you would realize that the price for the adaptor isn’t exactly cheap. In fact, for my most recent purchase of my friend’s adapter (AC to DC Adapter), it cost about S$70! You can get a battery for that price! And if you are going for OEM adapters (with the same voltage and maximum current), some of the head of those OEM adapters are of different size and thus cannot fit into your device. Pretty smart move by the manufacturer as this force you to purchase their own adaptors for ridiculously high prices. But unless you are a techie, you have no choice but to buy it.

Anyways, the concept of the Universal Power Adapter is that the adapter reads the information from the device and from there it gets the necessary voltage and current. Of course, the device needs a firmware with the information embedded somewhere in the first place. Thus support from device manufacturers is very important. Without the firmware embedded in the devices, this adaptor becomes useless. The company that makes this adaptor and supplies the technology is called Green Plug. The main aim of the company is to save the environment as if this concept takes off, we will see much much fewer adaptors and thus less waste. And not to mention, we can re-use the old adaptors for our new devices.

Another advantage is that the lower cost due to there being no need to ship adapters in their products can help attract customers due to the lower price and to sell more products. Not only cost of adaptors, but packaging, servicing, exchanges, repairs are also reduced as we go “universal”. I think that this is really a very good idea. It benefits both the customers and the producers. And it helps the environment. Imagine if you have 3 mobile devices like a PDA, your mobile phone and your Blackberry and each needs their own individual adaptors to charge. Thus, you will need to bring along all 3 adapters on your travels or to your workplace and at home. But now, with just one adapter, you can charge all the devices (maybe not ALL at the same time)! Isn’t it so much convenient to bring just one adapter?

For more information, please take a look at this article: Support Grows for universal power adapter.

I got this from my email and apparently I am a winner and will be getting a million pounds!

British Global Lottery
UNITED KINGDOM
(Claims Notification Department)Dear Esteemed Winner,

Ya, baby, ya. Read and weep guys. I am now a millionaire thanks to Global British Lottery and I can do anything I pleased. You see, good things come to people who wait. And I have waited a long long time to strike lottery and now, it has happened. It’s a bit funny that I don’t remember myself submitting my email address to any lotto sweepstakes before but who cares? I am going to be rich! I am going to contact this Alex David guy and give him all my particulars and collect my 1 million pounds! I don’t know what I am going to do with all these money that the Global British Lottery is giving away so generously, but I think that spending it should be fun!

So bye guys, I won’t be seeing you in the near future. Perhaps I will be relaxing at some tropical island somewhere and enjoying the sun.

If we were actually invaded by aliens from outer space and seek to destroy us, who do you guys think they will likely to kill first? I guess this is the very question for the government to wonder as they are the ones who must protect the important people in our country. Aliens are smart, that’s why they have space ships that can fly in space and can warp time and matter. They are also smart enough to build weapons of mass destruction (maybe like those found in Iraq) that can annihilate the human race from the face of this Earth. The only choice we have to is hide these important people and hope that the aliens cannot find them so that later on, we can continue living on as a human race.

However, we must first know who to protect and who we should throw to the wolves. Well, here is my own take on this important matter, we must protect the following groups of people.

1. Beer Makers - Without beer, we are nothing. Also we cannot get drunk and say silly things.
2. Kung Fu People - Without Kung Fu, we cannot fly about and dodge bullets. Pandas as well. They are so cute.
3. Pizza Makers - Without Pizza, we will grow hungry. When we are hungry, we get moody and cry/complain.
4. Teachers - Without teachers, we cannot sleep. And when we cannot sleep, we can’t do great things.
5. Mobile Phone Makers - Without mobile phones, we cannot discuss about the latest movies and fashion. We also cannot spread rumours fast enough to ruin people’s lives.
6. Janitors - Without janitors, we got to clean our own toilets. Where got time?
7. Internet Makers - Without Internet, we cannot share files. If we cannot share files, then what’s the point of living? We also cannot watch Youtube and post nasty messages on blogs.

Okay, that’s about it. For the sake of humanity, that’s all we should protect and perhaps hide them in an underground mountain where alien lasers cannot penetrate. Or we could build those nuclear bunkers with lead shielding? And we should also consider having an emergency response team which could extract these people and rush them to these special hideouts/bunkers fast. You will never know how fast the Aliens can strike.

For the rest of the people, I am sorry. But you guys are disposable so you will have to die if the Aliens come knocking on our front door.

Wow, we are getting some real weird weather in Singapore. Just yesterday when I was out, we have about 10 different weather patterns in a space of one hour. No, I am not joking at all. When I left my house, it was sunny. When I reach the bus-stop, it was raining. When my bus came, it was sunny again! When I reach my destination, it was raining heavily. And when I returned to the bus stop, it was windy and cloudy. After that I took the bus home, it was sunny again. Well, I cannot give you the exact time or weather, but it sure was crazy.

Perhaps now the weather is going cuckoo and we are paying for what we have done to the environment? You know, pollution and crap we throw out everyday when we drive cars, burn stuff and generally dirty the air we breathe? I think they call it green house effect and those are green house gases which trap the heat and it can’t escape. Luckily in Singapore, we don’t have those “freaks of nature” like cyclones and tornados and diasters like that. We do get the lesser kinds. But I was wondering how long will it be before we too face such diasters if we don’t stop polluting our environment? I mean we are facing weird weird weather patterns already.

Just this morning, we are facing a huge heatwave again. Yes, it’s morning and it’s very very warm already. Normally, it won’t be sunny till about 8 to 9am. Today, it is blazing hot at 745am! The sad thing is that most Singaporeans are not worried about polluting our environment. Either that or they don’t give a damn. However, I am appealing to everyone of you to start protecting our environment. You don’t need to do alot, just perhaps don’t drive for one day in a week. Or just bring your own bag when you do grocery shopping. It’s very simple and doesn’t take much effort. And you can make a difference.