9 Days to World Cup 2006!

A man had great tickets for the World Cup final. As he sits down, another man comes down and asks if anyone is sitting in the seat next to him.

"No," he says. "The seat is empty."

"This is incredible!" said the man. "Who in their right mind would have a seat like this for the world cup final, the biggest sporting event in the world, and not use it?"

He says, "Well, actually, the seat belongs to me. My wife was supposed to come with me, but she passed away. This is the first world Cup Final we haven't been to together since we got married."

"Oh ... I'm sorry to hear that. That's terrible. But couldn't you find someone else - a friend or relative, or even a neighbour -to take the seat?"

The man shakes his head... "No. They're all at the funeral."

Comfort in theatres

Did you know that the X-Men creator appears for a brief moment in the third episode? If you remember the early part of the movie where Prof Xavier and Magneto went to see Jean Grey in her home, Prof Xavier used his power to make all the cars 'hanging' in the air. At that moment, there is an old man watering plants at the garden looking stunned. That old man is the X-Men creator. I was also being told that the creator also appears in part 2, but I don't remember any part of that episode and where he appears.

Anyway, I watched this movie at the Mall and did not have a good time. It's not because X-Men III is boring, it's because the place stinks. I have experienced this everytime I go to the cineplex and can smell the odor at the very moment I stepped in. It smells of cold sweat and a bit of 'damp' odor. I shall not describe furthur. But this is the problem with fabric seatings.

At Empire cinema, the seats are leather. Everything is great there... clean, plenty of legroom, large seatings, except you cannot lean your head back. This, however, will change soon. There is now a dummy seat at the lobby of the cinema for you to try on. The new seats are fabric type and high back so you can lean your head. But the best thing about the new seat is that when you sit on it, the back can be pushed backwards, so that your back can lay at a slanted angle rather than vertical.

I don't know when they will replace the current one to the new seats. But I believe their business will pick up after that. Let's hope they maintain the new fabric seats.

One week holiday?

I have predicted that this week could be the least productive week of the year 2006. Here's my explanation:

Monday - You feel so lazy to wake up early for work. So you sleep another 15minutes, the boss won't bother since you're only slightly late. On the way to work, you encountered huge traffic because you have passed that time when there is lower traffic volume. When you arrived at office, you can't do any work as you still feel sleepy, this time yesterday... you were still on bed sleeping. In the end you didn't do much work.

Tuesday - It's a public holiday tomorrow. Everyone look forward to it. Every now and then your colleagues go to your office cubicle to chat. You have no mood to work at all. You look forward to 4.30pm. And infact you packed up your stuffs at 3.30pm.

Wednesday - Royal Brunei Armed Forces Day. Public Holiday.

Thursday - The Thursday Syndrome comes. You don't need to work on Friday. There is a common feeling among you and your colleagues not to do much work today as the weekend is approaching. You stay longer in the canteen than any other day of the week. When you go back to your office, you start to plan what to do from Fri to Sun.

Friday - No work.

Saturday - You experiences Saturday Syndrome. (Refer to Thursday)

Sunday - There goes the best week of the year.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!!

To Polish or Wax?

Many do not know if there's any difference between polishing and waxing a car. This two terms have different meanings.

Polish is an abrasive cleaner for your car's paint while wax is just a protectant coat. Polish brings out the shine in your car and can remove embedded dirt or surface imperfections. Because polish is a mildly abrasive cleaner, it can reduce surface scratches, depending on the severability of the scratch.

It's time to polish your car when you have noticed discoloration in your paint (due to oxidation), or that glow in your car has dissappeared. And it's time to wax your car when it loses the ability to 'repel' dirt. You know this when everytime you wash your car, you feel the dirt is very tough to get removed. You can also tell that by how repellant to water your paint is.

Then there is this magic product called 'Gel, Bug & Tar Remover', which is a cleaner where you spray a small section on the stubborn dirt, let it sits for a while and allow you to wipe off the dirt easily.

Another less common product is a Clay Bar. It looks like a clay (something like playdoh), but very much harder. It picks up everything in your car's paint, wax, polish and dirts, but will not remove your paint. This is used only before polishing a car, but is considered a product which is quite difficult to use, and better leave it to the professsionals.

Rain-X which I'm sure most of you heard of, is a product that is to be applied to your windscreen or windows, or even your headlights/taillights to repel water. With this you can drive in heavy rain with very good road visibility. All you need to do is wipe a thin layer on your window, let it dry (it dries really quickly as it contains alcohol content) and wipe it off. My preferred method is to gently let running water through the windscreen, and gently wipe dry with a chamois. In case you don't know what a chamois is, it's a piece of special cloth that is very hydrophilic , and makes drying a car effortless.

So overall, the proper process to polish and wax your car goes like this: 1) Wash and dry, 2) Bug & Tar Remover to remove any stubborn stain, 3) Clay bar - optional , 4) Polish, 5) Wax.

You may apply more than one layer of wax onto your car, the more layer you apply, the longer the wax lasts and provide more protection on your paint.

Business-minded Koperasi

I attended an investment talk this morning presented by a Koperasi. It gave me an overview of what they do, and surprises me that a Koperasi can get so business-minded.

If you don't already know what a Koperasi is: A Co-operative is an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise.

They have businesses in transportation, fuel station and grocery store as well as provide loans and savings to their shareholders. One thing that interest me to this talk is about their new investment in breeding Arowana. They projected that on average, they can sell each arowana at 10k. And just imagine when they have a pond, that will be thousands of arowana, which means millions of dollars. The arowana will be pure breed and comes with certificates, to be exported to other countries. Apparently they have already embarked on this project, and are very optimistic with the project.

I was also told that they are one of the most successful Koperasi in Brunei. They actually invites the public to be their shareholder. So if you are interested, you may have a look at www.tasamul.com

X-men !!!

They finally decided to release the part 3 eh... I cannot remember how long I have waited for it, nor can I remember what happened in part 1 & 2 at all. But this is one of the best movies I have ever seen. I think the first released of X-Men did gave some other producers on new movies idea about mutant, such as the Fantastic-4.

Just to review the X-Men characters:

Wolverine - Possesses three retractable claws through the his skin between the knuckles. Can heal surface wounds in minutes and extensive injuries in hours.

Storm - Can sense and influence meteorological patterns. Can generate lightning from her body. Can fly by creating a wind strong enough to support her body.

Mystique - Can change her appearance exactly as any other human including finger and voice print as well as retina scans.

Jean Grey - Able to read minds, project thoughts and move objects with her mind.

Cyclops - Ability to project optical blast from his eyes with incredible and deadly force.

Angel - Can fly obviously. All aspects of his anatomy are adapted for flight.

Beast - Superhuman agility, strength and endurance.

Rogue - (The prettiest lady there...) Can absorb the energy of anyone that she comes into skin-to-skin contact with. For humans this means absorbing their life force, which usually results in a vegetative state for the victim.

Iceman - Can lower his external and internal body temperature allowing him to freeze liquid. (Gets to kiss Rogue... GRRrrr!)

Prof Xavier - Ability to alter and manipulate minds. Can appear as an image in the minds of others. Possess the most powerful telepath on the planet.

Magneto - Capable of manipulating and channeling magnetic fields. Able to fly by manipulating the earth's fields.

Kitty Pride - Can phase through solid objects by becoming intangible. Ability to use phasing to absorbs energy blasts and attacks, as well as to use it to move others through objects and surfaces.

Pyro - Can control fire by allowing it to grow in size, intensity and direction. Cannot create fire but requires only the smallest spark to ignite.

Colossus - Can convert body tissue into an organic steel-like substance, granting him superhuman strength and a high resistance to injury.

Juggernaut - Unstoppable force. Once the Juggernaut begins moving in a given direction no power on earth can stop him. Superhuman strength and near invulnerability.

Roundabouts Traffic Lights

Do you remember the last time they turn on the traffic lights at certain roundabouts in B.S.B? Do you remember the amount of traffic (and havoc) it created? Do you remember the time you stucked in the jam? Do you remember how late you reach home that day? Do you remember?

If you are one of them, you are just another victim of their testing stage. I remember they turned it on for a day or two and everyone started complaining. Obviously it didn't work. The traffic got worst.

I was having tea in a restaurant and talked about it to a friend which I haven't met for some time. He told me he works as an officer in JKR. So I thought it would be good I share with him what I experience/heard about this traffic lights in roundabouts, and the public's response. After complaining about all sorts of things on those traffic lights, and I even told him how my ex-boss get really pissed with it... he told me he is the officer in charge of this project. Sighs...

Anyway, he told me that they will turn on the traffic lights again. (Brace yourself.) But unsure when. They will need to make a careful study on the traffic before turning on again. I believe this is all about timing of the traffic signals. Once you get it right, I think this will work. Other countries have done it, and it works. I am sure they do use some kind of computer simulation to simulate the traffic flow. If you notice on certain busy roads, there are small cables placed on the road, and runs at right angle to the roads. That is actually a traffic counter. This statistics is used by JKR and Shell (as I was told). I am not sure why Shell needed this, but I think it could be for fuel consumption studies, etc.

Apart from all these, there are ways to control the traffic lights. While working in a private sector company in the past, I remember making some research on monitoring traffic lights remotely using SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition). The name says it all. It retrieves live data and can control the traffic lights from a remote area. Apart from that certain countries uses SCOOT (Split Cycle Offset Optimisation Technique) which is an adaptive system that responds automatically to fluctuations in traffic flow through the use of on-street detectors. There are a few more common systems which certain countries uses accordingly to their traffic flow. So if you have a proposal, with a serious intention of course, please do so to the JKR department. They are most welcome for it.

How much is my blog worth?

Some domain fetches lots of $$$. I came across a site which calculates how much your blog is worth. Please don't ask me what the calculation is based on, or how it is calculated. I tried input popular websites into it and got these values:

www.yahoo.com $11,662,267.32
www.google.com $80,904,791.94
www.microsoft.com $28,417,249.98
www.bbc.co.uk $22,289,732.82
www.friendster.com $11,693,317.02

You can try out and see how much your blog is worth too. The link is provided on the side bar. Do let me know how much your blog is worth. On furthur tries, I found these:

www.brudirect.com $0.00
www.qipswimming.blogspot.com $0.00

My conclusion is, no matter how many people visit your site daily, it's not worth a cent.

Eye Deception

If you watch the above images, Mr Angry is on the left and Mrs Calm is on your right. Now move backwards about 6 feet or more. You'll notice they switched places.

This illusion was created by Phillipe G. Schyns and Aude Oliva of Uni of Glasgow. This proves that whatever you see may actually not be there. Careful if you think your friend is angry! He/She maybe not be angry at all.

Chairing it

Chairing a meeting is actually more difficult than I thought. I had the opportunity to be the chair person for a technical meeting consisting of about 25 people this morning. It was more like a unplanned chairing as I did not prepare the speeches at all.

I've always prefer an informal talk in any level of meeting. However this is a different case. The chair person is expected to, of course, start the meeting in a formal way of speeches. It has to start with a Welcome speech, followed by Prayers, an Introduction of what will be covered in the meeting, and followed by issues to be raised.

It felt awkward to me as I have a feeling of rush to end this meeting. I tried to think that the attendees as people who work under me, however it's hard to keep that mindset as you know some of them know more than you. I guess experience counts when it comes to confidence. You can't fool yourself.

Anyway before I realised, the meeting has already ran for more than an hour. The ending part felt strange too. I felt I am trying to get all the attendees out of the room quickly, but of course after the food and drinks. And have you realised something, it is always difficult to get the first person to stand up and get the drinks before the Chair person actually do it first.

A word of advise, if you organised a meeting, and you do not know who is chairing it, you better come prepared.

They cut the trees

I went home yesterday and found a big surprise. They have started work beside my house for the new access road. This new access road has actually been planned by JKR for at least two years ago. The Government bought over some lands behind my house for this project, and was being told they paid the owners well. I regretted not taking an earlier photo of the view before they cut down the trees.

I wonder how many reams of paper could have been made from that. This is what I found: There is no simple answer to that, any number is just an estimate. Paper is made of a mix of types of wood, softwood, hardwood, and heights and width of bark has to take into considerations. The estimated typical calculation goes like this:

One ream equals 500 sheets of paper. And one ream uses 6% of a tree. This means 1 tree makes 16.67 reams of paper, which is equivalent to 8,333.33 papers. This may seem quite a large amount of paper. But think about how long it takes to grow a tree. And this question would go back to what type of trees you're growing.

A much needed Friday

Apparently I believe we tend to enjoy the holidays more when you know you have a lot of work in mind. There is a perception in the public that the government officers do not have much work in comparison to the private sector employee. This is completely wrong. Being used to work in the private sector, I can assure that the Government officers have just as much work to do. I know this is subjective to the work scope but whoever used to think like me, please change your mindset.

I do believe however, that the Government officer although having a lot of work, they can still leave work on time. Why? This is because in whatever project they are dealing with, they are the top of the food-chain. In other words, the client. Which also means, they have the power to make all others wait, while those that is below the pyramid, could not do much and can only wait for them. But of course there are deadlines...