3.08pm: Robina felt giddy in their high-rise so Alvin’s brought them (and Sally the dog) over to the embassy which is a low rise building. People on the streets.
Johnny Lee [see blog], a grad student at Carnegie Mellon University introduced this windows app in Dec 2007 through YouTube. He received a standing ovation at TEDTalks when he demonstrated it.
A group of committed bloggers wil submit recommendations to the Minister for Information, Communication and the Arts within the next few days, on the subject of itnernet regulation. This open letter, which will be released to the public at the same time, will call for sweeping changes to bring Singapore in line with international norms and the reality of the new technology.
Despite a heavy head from the Mac meetup and a lack of sleep, the first thing that sprang to mind was Sintercom. And then it was the familiar issue of the quality of forest reserve management:
A responsible wildlife researcher finds a nature reserve without clear rules an unsavoury prospect. The reason? No one is sure when park rangers will decide, arbitrarily, to throw them out. The visitors who are left to practise in the reserve are all poachers! These anarchic individuals visit the forest to derive profit at the expense of significant impact! Meanwhile, the health of the ecosystem not only degenerates, no one really knows its condition - reserve managers are not getting feedback from wildlife biologists who would have been working in the area. Researchers worth their salt are now all working in other forests around the region or have switched fields. Only poachers roam the forest at night.
The management of the nature reserve that decides to declare clear rules, which it enforces will find it self in a different situation. Add to that advise from wildlife biology practitioners and users about perceived transgressions. This community, familiar with wildlife biology studies, is able to provide a fair and realistic evaluation. With these rules in place, researchers return to conduct forest studies. The result? A maturing management system that results ultimately in a healthy ecosystem.
Simplistic? Missed the point? I’ll sleep on it and find out what the bloggers really meant to say when their document is eventually released.
Alvin recently downloaded Hotspot Shield, a software that protects users of public hotspots against hacking. Happily it helps bypass network blocking apperently!
So now, he’s happy checking BBC, blogspot, wordpress etc!
During a gathering for a friend’s birthday celebration today, I heard about Randy Pausch, computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University who was diagnosed with terminal cancer when he delivered “How to Live Your Childhood Dreams” to his students and colleagues. He delivers the lecture with exuberance and says, “If I don’t seem as depressed or morose as I should be, sorry to disappoint you.”
He also says, he experienced a death bed conversion: “I just bought a Macintosh.”
Here is a Wall Street Journal video report of the talk:
The full lecture (1 hour 44 min) is on Google Video.
Then I use the “find” (cmd-F) command to search for, in this case, “September”. The data for the month scrolls up and I can check the tides for the International Coastal Cleanup Singapore.
The coastal cleanup is always conducted on the 3rd Saturday of September every year on he beaches. It’s just a question of whether the mangrove cleanups will be conducted the same day.
As it turns out, it IS a low tide that morning:
20 Sep 2008
7:49 AM SGT - 1.17 m
2:13 PM SGT - 3.10 m
This means the mangrove cleanup will take place the same day as the beach cleanup.
