Here is a charity related event event, they are kind enough to send me their press release, so I will post it down here for them, as a means of helping those who will benefit from the event itself.

For the first time, Dover Park Hospice is organizing a Walk to raise much-needed funds to improve their facilities, develop new programmes and enable better hospice care to its patients.

Registration for the Walk is at $30 for adults with a concession fee of $25 for full-time students, senior citizens aged 55 and above and medical industry workers. To be eligible for the concession fee, applicants have to provide proof at time of registration.

Registration can be done online at www.doverpark.org.sg or at Dover Park Hospice from 18 August 2009. Other registration points will be announced soon.

For more media information, please contact:

I always wanted to get this article written since late last year, but didn’t get much to publish it as a work in constant progress until now. It goes to show how busy I was to even get this simple writeup timely done. Finally it is written. This article talks mainly about the experiences following my visit to the Singapore flyer last year, particularly before the notorious breakdown last December as well, so my views are still largely unbiased with some updates here and there added cumulatively. This is more or less a self contained article talking about the background of the flyer and how it was conceived to the actual visit and ride on the grounds itself. Lots of nice panoramic photos await!

You can check out the article on my column page or jump directly to it here. You can also view photos of the trip in the flyer photo gallery.

The site will be down about 10 minutes at around 3pm SGT today for a system RAM change and reboot sorry for any downtime during that period.

Update: 3.17pm The maintenance was a success, resuming normal site operations.

Being an avid fan of the battlemech universe, this installment to the mechwarrior franchise will sure to get any battletech fans jumping out for joy. The latest trailer released by Piranha Games shows the in game-graphics bringing out all the details of the battlemechs, far better than what I recall having entered the series in Mechwarrior 2, where there are like only 3 colours you can see on screen- the sky, ground and your HUD frame.

The trailer shows many interesting aspects of the game and HUD, particularly the all irritating cockpit voice. The core failure was spectacular too, and the cockpit features free-look just like in most modern cockpit simulators now. Not sure whether the HUD displays are live or just animated textures though. There are countless ways to destroy enemy mechs, so as how you as a pilot can to- I will be damned so see how an overheat meltdown gets to as well, if only there is the possibility to spam large lasers with your coolant flush depleted.

Nothing shown on my favorite mechs, the Timberwolf aka Madcat and the Vulture, but whatever your favorite is, I guess this new game will sure allow you to experience it the best any game can offer to date.

The trailer in High-Def on the click:

Traveling is quite a a big part of life in the UK, it’s also a way of life. Simple short trips can easily go for hours on end. Time where you can just prep your day with some coffee, a good book, your music player or a fully charged laptop and embark on your journey on the bus for the day. You can meet strangers on the way where the offerings of a good chat or two won’t be long fetched either. The same can’t be said for the bus waiting times either- 30 minute wait for a bus is considered alright in the UK, considering most commuter buses travel at least hundreds of kilometers easily at a go per trip. This is in stark contrast to those we experience in Singapore, with even people complaining when waiting times go longer than 10 minutes.

Though arguably, with Singapore’s smaller size, a tighter timetable is within realistic requirements, but with that too comes the increased expectations as well, not to mention complaints of long waiting times. I guess Singaporeans will always be a spoilt bunch. On the other end of the spectrum, if you try going round the rural roads of India as a hitchhiker, so as I learnt through few episodes of lonely planet with Ian, things are really far worst off, not to mention thrilling as well.

So for those in Singapore, how is a commute around Cambridge like? The following is a video of how a typical bus commute, sped up by a factor of 2 with journey through towns, motorways and country sides (aka B roads).

There had been some minor inconsistent errors which always seems to come and go on the gallery. So far the site has been successfully tested on primary browsers, firefox 2+, internet explorer 7+, safari 3+ and google chrome. But I noticed however, that the images in the gallery occasionally turn out broken, particularly when SEO short URLS are enabled. They all come on on when disabled.

It seems to be a URL rewrite problem which only seems to be evident on Google Chrome so far. I do not want to bet on simply just clearing the cache on my other browsers to effectively test this bug, but they always turn out fine. Now I am paranoid on whether it being a Chrome-only isolated bug, or something more to it.

Investigation is still under way, so if you happen to be around the galleries, do check out on this link to it and see whether are you able to see any missing images there. To report a bug, simply use the contact link on the left or reply in the comments below.

Thanks!

With my university term starting in October, it’s very much shopping time to get the gears and stuffs in preparations for my departure. Shopping is good therapy, well, not until you see the bill!

The choice of my desired system was much of a personal debated topic as well. The story started with this quad core desktop which I currently use as my primary computer, but it won’t be something I would see lugging all the way, let be shipping with my books to UK for use in the dorms. It will be too much to handle, let be to move around if I have to switch rooms between semesters. So the logical choice will be a laptop, which brings us to another problem- There is currently no laptop I have which has as much computing power as my desktop, the solution? Get a new laptop? What laptop? well!

After much searching and re-searching, I finally come to choose few desktop replacement laptops which I will using for my whole university term of 4 years till I graduate- namely the Alienware M17x (which gave me mixed feelings about it’s exclusivity when it was made available in Singapore now, though I planned to get it while in UK), the Clevo/Sager NP9850 (or the Core i7-940 based NP9280) and IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad W700. These babies are not so much your average laptop, with 17″ screens and weighing about 5kg- not much the proper definition of “portable” but beats lugging 20kg of steel and monitor around as well. Anyway this laptop will be based in my room as a personal system where it will be permanently mated to the wall socket. I will be using my current lighter Fujitsu tablet for lectures and tutorials.

The IBM Thinkpad is cool because it has a tablet built-in which is cool for illustrations or a quick doddle, but is not compared to a dedicated tablet which I already have. Though you can the bells and whistles such as Quad core processors, workstation graphics and DDR3, the W700 is expensive, let be overpriced- about $9000 fully loaded with not much graphic options as well. And yes, there is no Macbook pro which can satisfy my computing requirements, so I am leaving that completely out.

The Alienware however, appeals to me through 5 main points- Price, performance (it’s claimed to be the fastest laptop in the world at the moment), gamer orientation, X-factor and support is backed by Dell, which I say is superb. What’s more it has freaking cool lighting and doesn’t look like a laptop my dad would use. So for a laptop which is as or even exceedingly powerful than my desktop, I feel there is a need to turn to the “all-powerful”:

I am only having gripes to forgo the Sager NP9280 with the i7 processor, as that is truely proper desktop processor but it’s just a shame that laptop do not offer SLI or a blu-ray writer, what’s more it looks ugly.

Mmmm it seems that once you put your foot in quad cores and 1200p HD screens, you will never own a system lower than that. The laptop specified at the following costs about $5500 including GST. I have yet confirm prices through phone with Dell but it can be roughly $300-$500 cheaper by ordering through phone than online.

Frankly speaking $5500 is a considerable sum at a go. But after some consideration of this being my primary system for daily use with school, projects and maybe work, it’s quite a bargain for what I can possibility achieve with it. So do I consider this much of an investment rather than a purchase?

Can’t wait to get my hands on this.

I’ve always wanted to digitize my old holiday photos, but knowing that they are buried in storage under years of dust made it quite a turn off to do so, till now. I recently got this spanking new Canon all in one printer which allows for network scanning and printing over wireless-fidelity, so technically any PC can scan, copy and print anywhere in the house without the need of a physical cable connection or a PC always on to be a print server. It’s simply just turn on the printer then scan straightaway from any PC. So what else can I do but put it through it’s paces?

It was not an easy feat either, going through hundreds of photos yellowed out over the year, this was the best I could do to scan, crop and save each and every one of them manually before they fade into oblivion. At the same time, recapping all the old memories of my past travel trips. Recalling, Vancouver is still my most favorite spot in the world, followed by San Francisco, of course I have to also give credit to LA and the sin city of Vegas for their one of a kind attractions and world class theme parks I am always so frantic about.

My favorite of all have to be this two at Toontown, I will always go around finding this pair of dumbbells and try to lift them, I failed in 1995 in Los Angeles and still could not do so in 2000 in Japan. Maybe I need more work, yes that is the very different me 5 years apart and the latter 9 years from now.

1995

2000

Feel free to go through the albums, most of the America trip as done, except those in Japan and Thailand. Thailand, particularly Bangkok is one of my most frequented places, having traveled there for about 6 times to visit distant relatives before the political unrest, but ironically there are few memories and photos of my trips there as compared to the rest.

Things are so much easier with digital cameras now. A full gallery of my trips can be found in the places gallery.