Enjoying the view (Mr Bats)

Mr Bats likes to settle down onto my lap to enjoy the view in the late mornings. I like the way his arms cross when he is completely relaxed.

M1 Fixed Broadband 100mbps for another 24 months

I signed up for M1’s line in May 2009 for a 6-month trial at $94.40/month. That was certainly a high cost but Singnet was returning me one too many no service pages in the past year. A couple of years earlier I had switched out from Starhub after popularity choked the green pipe.

The six-month trial M1 experience had been relatively fuss-free and the high local bandwidth was very useful when I single-handedly uploaded photos for the International Coastal Cleanup Singapore in September, as well as other files to various servers. It is especially fast when the MacBook Pro is wired to the modem.

So yesterday, I extended the M1 Fixed Broadband 100MBps for two more years at $65/month. A year ago, I was paying more for less so it’s a big improvement.

Yes, you do have to login between sessions, but with browsers remembering your userid and password, it can become tolerable.

Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology) by Marvin Gaye

“Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” was the second single from Marvin Gaye’s 1971 album, What’s Going On.

It was also covered by Robert Palmer in 1990.

Weaned from paper diaries

Saw these NUS diaries at the Raffles Museum the other day and realised I’m finally weaned from these, thanks to Google Calendar.

GCal is my homepage to keep me alert about viewing and making appointments. Each appointment is also SMS’ed to my handphone (its free) and includes the location and notes. This is particularly helpful when stumbling about some strange venue and an SMS arrives with the proper address and relevant handphone numbers!

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

I share my calendar with my honours students so they are able to schedule meetings and field trips with me. Looks like I am scheduled for two this week, in between marking, argh! Maybe paper was better after all.

Basking in the sun

Monitor lizard up a coconut tree on Pulau Ubin this morning, with the LSM2251 Ecollogy and the Environment class.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Animal Diversity Pasar Malam

Yesterday’s animal diversity “pasar malam” – LSM1103 Biodiversity students visit a station every 20 minutes, for a “show and tell” of animal groups conducted by the TAs and myself.

Beach balled into using Pages

Thanks to Word for beach-balling me into using Pages – sometimes you just have to be forced into switching to a non-familiar app.

When preparing exam questions, I tend to use the old templates in Word to assemble the new document and I persist through the pauses incurred by the beachball to finish the job and move on.

Last night, after three bouts of Word going into a stupor, I finally got out and into Pages; after a mild struggle I found it did the job well.

So now I will to introduce it to a friend writing his thesis – might prevent grief later.

Exhausted cat can’t keep up

Poor Mr Bats, can’t keep up with my long hours of lesson preparation. This was another marathon for LSM1103 Biodiversity, a first year course in which we introduce some of the animal groups to the class. In this particular lecture, five phyla are discussed and Mr Bats slumped over the student's text book, Solomon et al. apparently in recognition of the futility of the task. In my time mollusca took two lectures.

Mr Bats did the same last year, on an opened book and the class got to see the 2008 photo too. Wasn't caught on the webcast thankfully as this all happens in the first few minutes when the last 10% of the class are streaming in.

I'd have expected these cats to do a better job of night vigils. The honours students this year appear to be wider awake in the dead of the night than these cats, hmph!

See and download the full gallery on posterous

SMRT Bloodmobile Drive | 22 Oct @ Rafles Place MRT

Options when Microsoft Word crawls

When I open Microsoft Word, life slows down to a crawl on my Mac. Mostly Word is really painful to use and the many significant pauses it subjects you to are capable of driving a calm person berserk.

Apple’s S$138 iWork package includes Pages, a native word processing application which speeds along in comparison. For my simple, unformatted needs though, I prefer using TextWrangler, a free text editor which I already use to write and edit webpages directly on servers. Text editors, of course, fly at the speed of light.

All Mac users already own TextEdit, a resident application of OS X. TextEdit can switch to an RTF option to allow for mild formatting needs and pdf generation is always a print option away in the Mac OS. Another of such applications is Bean, which I forgot about for awhile. It caught my eye once again and I am giving it another spin. Bean also reads docx files.

Google Docs (formerly Writely) is an excellent alternative, especially if you are on a stable internet connection. It is a boon for collaborative work (e.g. this Web 2.0 outline) and for working across multiple computers or opportunistically typing into an existing document when you find yourself stuck somewhere with a terminal and some spare time.

The limitation of all these, of course, is the need for document sharing with some Word user with a heavily formatted document or when tracking is necessary (it mostly isn’t). Then it’s time to fire up Microsoft Word again and force myself into a Zen state to deal with that inevitable beach ball.