SecondHand Saturday

SecondHand Saturday is a giant neighbourhood garage sales held in individual households to promote reuse, on the Saturday prior to the Council's General Household Cleanup. Residents register with their local Council, who will then publicise all of the sales in the local media to maximise turn out. Participating households display signs out the front of their homes advertising their sales. Any items which are not snapped up by neighbours and bargain hunters are collected by the council's general household cleanup the following day.

Stuff I bought, was given, and picked up:

• a pair of Infinity desktop speakers for $10 (The lady is selling a perfectly working color Canon Bubble Jet printer including cartridges for the same amount, but who needs printers at home?)
• a Seiko Corona Melodia mantel clock (Wind it up and it plays Zigeunerweisen.)
• Happy Meal toys from The Muppets, The Incredibles, Monster Inc., McDonald's and Winnie the Pooh for $1 (The lady asked me to get another handful for free, but I don't want to be greedy.)
• a 5-level timber bookshelf for $25
• a suitcase travel alarm clock from Merrill Lynch for $1 (Some online stores are selling it for US$50.)
• a set of National Panasonic hi-fi speakers
• a Teac portable AM/FM radio with CD player
• a small particleboard table
• miscellaneous PC parts and books

Third Swatch Lucky

They say a watch says a lot about a person. I wonder what my Swatch Irony says about me?

I bought my first Swatch in Manila back in 2003. It's a Once Again, and I bought it at a discount. Swatch prices are pretty much the same everywhere, and they rarely give discounts. They had a sale that one time because it's their 10th anniversary in the Philippines. I liked the Once Again model because the design is very simple and classic. Black plastic strap and body, white face, black markers and hands. The hands and markers are glow-in-the-dark, and there's even a magnified day/date window. A few weeks later, the plastic groove holding the battery cover in place started to crack. There were more cracks after a few days, and the cover came off, rendering the watch useless. Thinking maybe it's an old stock, and the plastic becoming brittle, I had the watch replaced. After a few weeks of normal usage, the same thing happened again. Applying super glue on the affected areas didn't help. It took weeks of persistent nagging before Swatch agreed to a refund.

And it's not like these Swatches are cheap. For the same amount of money, I could've bought a pretty decent classic Seiko or Casio (with a metal strap too, although I prefer leather). But I have to have a Swatch. To make sure nothing breaks apart this time, I bought an Irony. I was supposed to buy a Twirl Black when I was in Kuala Lumpur, but I ran out of shopping time. It turned out to be even cheaper at the Changi Airport Duty Free. Solid stainless steel casing, black face, silver markers, luminous-white hands and digits, bright-red second hand, and date function. Hope this one lasts longer.

Stephen Hawking Special

Finished two Hawking-related books. I said finished, not understood. A lot of the stuff just went flying over my head.

First is Kitty Ferguson's Stephen Hawking: Quest for a Theory of Everything. It's not really a biography - more like an introduction to the man, his family life, how it all started, past discoveries and recent research. People who haven't read A Brief History of Time or had a hard time understanding it should probably start with this book. Kitty devotes most of the pages explaining in plain English Hawking's theories and how he arrived at them.

I would be surprised if Kitty really understood everything written in the book. I mean, I understand fermions and boson, strong and weak forces, the uncertainty principle, general relativity, quantum mechanics, singularities, black holes, event horizon, entropy, etc. But when the discussion starts going into arbitrary elements, the cosmological constant, wormholes, superstrings, four-dimension space-time, my mind just can't take it anymore.

I'm surprised to find out at the end of the book that Stephen later separated with his wife of 20+ years. Jane has always been a devout Christian, and Stephen, well, let's just say he believes the moment of Creation started with a singularity. Then, there were grumblings that Stephen has been putting more priority on international tours, media outings, and his research than his family, which ultimately resulted in the breakup. Oh well, you can't win 'em all.

I also finished The Universe in a Nutshell, Hawking's sequel to A Brief History of Time. Did you know that:

• Time is pear-shaped? Einstein's theory of relativity shows that time and space are inextricably interconnected. One cannot curve space without curving time as well. And this time is bent back by matter in the early universe. The whole universe we observe is contained in a region whose boundary shrinks to zero at the big bang, which gives time its pear shape.
• The universe has multiple histories? I myself didn't know this. I just know that it has something to do with uncertainty principle, anthropic principle, and the universe being inflationary. Next.
• We can actually predict the future, as postulated by Newtonian determinism. Even with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, we still have to wave function to tell us how probable it is for something to happen. However, if information is being lost in black holes, then that would reduce our ability to predict the future. Question is, does part of the wave function get lost in black holes, does all of information get out again, as the p-brane model suggests?
• Time travel might just be possible. It has something to do with wormholes, cosmic strings, time travel horizon, time loops, negative energy flowing back into black holes, etc. Hawking didn't give a blueprint for a time machine.

Hawking also talked about the inevitability of DNA tweaking and growing embryos externally to speed up evolution. Pretty cool stuff, even if I didn't understand half of it.

Gmail Invites, Anyone?

Found out just recently that Gmail is slowly opening up its doors to the public. Gmail invitations used to be so hard to get that you have to be somebody or know a somebody to get one. They're so scarce, gmailswap.com was set up to facilitate exchange of Gmail invites from people who have them and people who'll do just about anything to get one.

So now what do I do with my 50 Gmail invites?

Movie 2005.03.29 - Shaun of the Dead

Another funny movie from the Brits. It's interesting how each country has its own brand of humour. Japanese/Koreans tend to be slapstick and overacting, and use facial and vocal expressions a lot. Filipino humor tends to be low-brow. French comedy is funny, but I can't figure out why. I'm not sure if Stephen Chow represents Chinese humour - but that guys is LOL funnee.

Anyway, story is about Shaun and Ed who wake up and find that the whole neighborhood turned into zombie land. On their way to rescuing Shaun's Mom and girlfriend (two different people), they get to bash and maim and run over a lot of zombies. But the numbers are against them. One by one - his stepfather, his Mom, his mates, his best friend Ed are either devoured or bitten/converted by zombies, while they wait it out in the pub - Shaun's great idea. The military came in at the last minute and blew away all the zombies. Actually, not all the zombies. The leftovers were recruited as cheap labor, and Shaun managed to retrieve zombie Ed, so he has someone to play video games with.

Humour, blood and gore, decapitations, action, suspense, drama, romance, etc. in 90 minutes. Not too bad.

Movie 2005.03.27 - Kopps

It's always hard to choose what movie to watch on TV, escpecially when you've never heard of them before. After watching the first scene of Swedish movie Kopps, I'm fairly confident this is a good one. Well-dressed man with moustache sitting on a restaurant dinner table. A lady later joined him. The lady immediately barraged him with questions. She decided he's not her type, and left even before the guy had a chance to order.

Jacob (pronounced Yah-kob) is actually is a police officer in a sleepy Swedish town, where crime is yet to be invented. Because of the zero crime rate, the whole police force (4 police officers, the dispatcher, plus the police chief) spends most of its time eating sausage lunches, playing poker with old ladies (and losing), renovating the local grocery store, fooling around the station, and yes, patrolling the streets.

One day, another police officer called Jessica (pronounced Yessica) drops by to say that their station will be closed down due to budget cuts. Jessica turns out to be girl Jacob met at a bar last night, while he was waiting for his date. (Clueless Jacob assumed Jessica was his mystery date when he walked in the bar, and proceeded to chat her up, so it was a funny sight when his real date turned up.) Anyway, to stop the station from being closed, Jacob and his partner started committing petty crimes to boost the statistics - bribing the local drunkard to steal from the grocery, simulating shoot-outs in the woods, destroying cars, burning down the sausage shop, etc. When the other police officers found them out, they were outraged. "Where are going to have our lunch now?!"

Benny the warfreak Cop decides to do one better and stages a kidnapping involving his neighbor's kid and the drunkard (again). Everything was proceeding quite smoothly with Benny rushing through the woods and barging into the kidnapper's shack by himself. The boy was freed, and the "kidnapper" took him instead. That's when things started going wrong. The dispatcher called in the SWAT team because he thought the kidnapping is for real. Jacob sneaks into the shack to relay the news. A horde of SWAT cops storms into the woods. Apparently, Benny wasn't expecting this one because it's not part of the script. Jacob swapped clothes with the drunkard, and uses Benny as hostage, then drives off with the getaway car. Actually, it was Benny who did the driving. He was so pumped up, he drove like the action heroes in the Hollywood movies, even though nobody was chasing them. He manages flip over the car while making a sharp turn. Lo and behold! Benny is actually balding, a fact which even Jacob doesn't know. At this point, Benny goes melodramatic, crying about his lack of girlfriend, lack of hair, etc. etc.

The handcuffed Jacob and Benny makes a run for it, with the SWAT hot on their heels. Suddenly, Benny got a stomach ache and has to go right then and there. It was a funny sight when they were discovered by everyone. Benny with his wig askew, crouched and straining with his pants down; Jacob stooping a bit because of the handcuffs, trying to avoid the smell.

Regardless of the team's efforts, the police station still had to be shut down. Jessica tore up the report she made to spare everyone involved the embarrassment. Last scene shows the guys running a "Police Pizza" operation, and doing quite well. (Volvos make nice pizza delivery cars.)

Book 2005.03.13 - The Bluest Eye

Finally finished reading Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. (Toni Morrison is winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature.) A sticker on the front cover announces that this book is a selection of Oprah's Book Club. Wow, no wonder this book is good. (Ahem.) The book is pretty thin, about half an inch, but it's not the kind of book that you speed read. First heard of Toni Morrison from a book club magazine when her book Love came out.

The story is pretty simple - incest in a sleepy town and how people react to it. Eleven-year old Pecola Breedlove is ugly and poor. Victimized by her own father, she prays that she'll have the blondest hair and the bluest eye, so that her world will become different. Most of the book is devoted to character development. You can almost imagine in your mind's eye each of the characters and how they look. The author is so good with words. Read the following passages from The Bluest Eye, and you'll know what I mean.

"We in this colony took as our own the most dramatic, and the most obvious, of our white master's characteristics, which were, of course, their worst. In retaining the identity of our race, we held fast to those characteristics most gratifying to sustain and least troublesome to maintain. Consequently, we were not royal but snobbish, not aristocratic but class-conscious; we believed authority was cruelty to our inferiors, and education was being at school. We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom. We raised our children and reared our crops, we let infants grow, and property develop. Our manhood was defined by acquisitions. Our womanhood by acquiescence. And the smell of your fruit and the labor of your days we abhorred."

"All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us - all who knew her - felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used - to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength. And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word. She, however, stepped over into madness, a madness which protected her from us simply because it bored us in the end."

Dummy for a Dummy

Ikea is having a 60% clearance sale. As we just moved house, we're on the prowl for new stuff to buy. I always feel like a kid inside a toy store whenever I go in an Ikea store. There's lots of cool stuff you don't really need, but you just want to have. Good thing my sisters were there to keep me in check.

When they weren't looking, I grabbed a Gestalta artist's dummy. It's a wooden doll with movable joints for the arms, legs, torso, and neck, so you can make it pose it lots of different ways. My sisters can't understand why I would want such a dummy, and were strongly suggesting I drop it. For such important things, you just have to stand your ground.

Another Walk in the Clouds

Not satisfied with my trip up the skybridge of the Petronas Twin Towers, a colleague and I decided to give the Menara KL (KL Tower) a visit. It opens until 10pm, so we went there after work. The place is not that easy to find. It is visible from almost everywhere in the city, but to access it you have to walk along a narrow side road. Best option is to get off Rajah Chulan station. (If you look at the map, it is closer to Bukit Nanas, but trust me on this one.) When you get off the station, walk along Jalan Sultan Ismail, turn left at Jalan Ramlee, then right at Jalan Puncak. Just follow the winding path and you'll end up at the base of the Menara KL.

Menara KL is the tallest structure in South-East Asia, the tallest single standing concrete structure in the world, 421 meters above the ground, 515 meters above sea level. Entrance fee to the observation deck is RM 15. When you get to the lobby area, look up and admire the glass ceiling arranged in the traditional Islamic form of the "Muqarnas". Artisans from Iran were specially called in to work on the domed ceiling. The design illustrates the seven layers of the sky with sun rays shining from the middle - representing the human journey for perfection in life.

The Tower Shaft has 22 levels, while the Tower Head has 6 levels. The entire Tower Head is clad in glass (double-glazed with gas infilled) arranged in the traditional Islamic form of the "muqarnas". First level is the observation platform, while the next features the revolving Restoran Berputar Seri Angkasa. There are four high-speed lifts gets you from the lobby to the observation deck 276 meters above in just 60 seconds. The entrance fee includes a multi-language audio tour of Kuala Lumpur's city skyline from 12 locations of the Observation Deck. No tour guide; you're given an mp3 player where you key in the location code to hear a description of that section of the skyline. There are also some fixed binoculars around.

The 360-degree view of the city at night is spectacular. I wasn't able to get sharp pictures because I don't have a tripod, and the glass reflects internal light. My colleague with his 120x zoom Handycam is having a field day.