Got a brand new pair of cans. Retail price is S$160 but I got it slightly cheaper because of some strings I pulled (...ahem).
This model (ATH-M50) has been nominated as one of the products for this years Annual Technical Excellence & Creativity Awards. See this link:
http://www.audio-technica.com/cms/happenings/8dc4c50fdc92378a/index.html
The manufacturer's review for this item can be found here:
http://www.audio-technica.com.sg/products/headphones/ath-m50
For the price I paid, it had to be better than my S$80 Sony MDR-EX85 which I already found pretty good. The sound quality was pretty good with very good mids and highs clarity, although the bass seems rather flat and lack a punch; but not being a bass-head, it was ok for me.
Its real huge and I wouldn't want to be using them on the bus or train. But trying them out walking back from the bus station to my PC, the cables were well insulated unlike the fish-string thin cables my Sony has, with no noticeable interference with the mp3 player in FM radio mode.
Audio Technica headphones is famous for its comfort. You can almost live with them (because they are not waterproof, you got to take them out during showers, of course to some thats an optional activity). The other shortcomming I see is the weak pastic-y hinges the pads are connected to the headband. After a few twists and drops, this would probably be the first thing to break.
Its a plus that the phones can be folded in to be stored, saving space. I was also surprised that my tiny Muvo Tx could power the humongous divers (45mm) just as easily as my tiny Sony (13.5mm); but I didnt use it long enough to notice if my battery would drain 3x as fast as normal headphones.
Well, heck care, it sounds good and I'm happy with it now. Time will tell if its like wine or a Proton car. The former gets better with aging, the latter goes from wow to below average in 3 days.
I'm giving it a Sam's rating of 4.5 white mice out of 5.
Got a cd by Corrinne May titled Beautiful Seed. It sold 6000+ cd's in Singapore over the past launch week. Pretty hot for a local singer IMHO. But after listening to it for a round, yup, she's worth it. (even on my messy table)
http://www.corrinnemay.com
Love the title track, Beautiful Seed
you can fill the darkness with just one flash of light
break the silence with just one word
one defiance starts a revolution
one life can save the world
On the steps of Washington
Sprinkled like confetti
thousands of people sing
"we shall overcome"
the preacher shouts
"let freedom ring"
he gave his life for what he believed
chorus:
you can be a witness
you can be a prophet
you can make the whole world believe
break the strongest fortress
change the way the world thinks
you can build a bridge where foes can meet
hope for the future
shout it don't whisper
for dreams are what we make them to be
there is hope in every heartbeat
tiny as it seems
you're a beautiful seed
she's a pastors daughter
she's only sixteen
but her heart and her belly are
breaking at the seams
her boyfriend blames her
he wants to pay
for the doctor to wash it away
as she lays in the hospital
a Christmas choir singing
about a child in a manger
fragile and small
"unto us is born a savior"
she looks at her baby and cries
and she sings him a lullaby
Every hope
every power
lies in the heart of a seed that flowers
intertwined all across the land
we're all seeds in the makers hand
Was using Thunderbird to access my student email box since forever and just today realized the junk filter works so well, Thunderbird doesnt display any junk mail in its folders, i.e. I cant see it, and cant delete it so it has been accumulating since dont know when. Only when I open it up using the web based exchange server will the ugly mails pop up.
Ever noticed that doctors and lawyers refer to their businesses as a 'practice'. Was thinking about it when I was hospitalized two weeks ago (will tell more another time). They are actually just practicing on patients and clients. It may not work because no one is perfect, but hey! Practice makes perfect, so let them practice their skills on you and maybe you will get to go home in one piece. Thats kind of scary from the viewpoint of the other guy because we think that after you graduate with that LLb or MBBS or PhD or whatever, you should be a professional doctor or lawyer or whatever. Then why should you call it a profession, if you are not a professional at it? And isn't the university or classroom the place where you make all your mistakes and learn from the best tutors and lecturers so that when you do graduate, you dont commit the same mistakes as the textbooks spell out?
Thats the thing about growing up. When I was a kid, A= apple, 1+1 = 2, and 1230pm = lunch. But as you grow up, things are not so straight forward. Biology tells me that A= alanine, physics says that 1+1=0, but 1230 is still lunchtime. I feel a sense of security when things are fixed, when there is a schedule to follow, a plan to execute, a law to abide by. But this world is exactly opposite that. Thats why there is dynamics, there is fluidity, time and tide, tolerance, margin of error, grades,... nothing is set in stone. And because nothing is permanent, one can never claim to know all. Which leads us to only at best, make a sensible calculated guess on the next step to take.
Which is why we are all just practicing
Long story cut short, I got a free electric toothbrush, Braun-OralB Vitality. Retail price is S$36.
This is the first time I used an electric toothbrush, and yeah, its true, this cleans far better than an ordinary manual toothbrush. The brush head looks tiny but looking at older electric brush models, it can be considered big already. Still, one can purchase a bigger brush head that can be attached to the body.
High end electric toothbrushes both vibrates and oscillates, this one only vibrates, and costs a third of the price of one that does both functions.
I find the brush excellent in cleaning those hidden crevices and although a little short to reach the back of my molars, it still cleans better than manual because with the traditional method, I keep hitting the back of my mouth with the brush causing bleeding. The motor ensures the brush head never makes surprise moves. Still, on the first few days of using it, my gums bled a little.
The battery life is pathetic, the manual states that a 16 hour charge will give the motor 20 minutes of juice. I have not put it to the test but after 15-16 minutes of using, it is recharged faithfully; the whole unit gets warm during charging. This is one thing you will not bring along long trips to the Himalayas.
the whole instrument is rubber coated, making it waterproof but I have found that you need to separate and wash the brush head from the body after every use because toothpaste residue gets stuck between the two parts, and not washing it thoroughly enough will leave your table with halos (see picture).
The other bugbear I have is the cost of replacement brush heads. it has far lesser plastic and bristles as an ordinary manual toothbrush but costs double or triple one.
Terrific jam yesterday on the highway which I have to pass to get home. There were some cops up ahead directing traffic. The papers said nothing about it today.
This is a test post. Post a test blog. Blogging is testing. Test a post. Post a test.
The speaker at last Sunday's service told this story:
A young girl was sitting at the back of her class listening to her teacher talk about fishes and whales and all those things that swim in the sea. Then he remarked, 'You know, its impossible for a whale to swallow a whole human being, its just not biologically possible.'
The girl was alittle bemused as that statement contradicted what she had been thought at Sunday School, the story of Jonah being swallowed whole by a big fish.
The teacher went on and on about whalebones and plankton filtering and the girl got more and more upset. At last, she couldnt stand it any longer and raised her hand
'But what about Jonah?'
'Well, young lady, science tells us its just not possible'
'But the story is true'
'Biology says its not'
'But...'
'You have got to be able to differentiate between truth and stories'
'Well, but I'm going to ask Jonah myself one day when I get to heaven!'
to which the teacher asked, 'and what if he went to hell?' snickering
'Oh, in that case, YOU can ask him.'
Its the only book you need because after going through the 1020 pages, I dont think any sane reader will want to read another word of advice on using Office 2007. Read through till p353 and skimmed the last ten or so chapters and already loosing steam to finish up anther 500 important pages dealing with Word, Excel and Powerpoint.
But the book is good. Actually I have no right in saying that because I have never read any other Office book so throughly before. Office 2007 is different because its so different from the other versions previously. Flash based and no more menu bars. Instead it is context driven ribbons, i.e. the menu only comes out when you 'need' it, eg. the edit picture buttons are not there until you click on an inserted clip art or picture in the document. And for most commands, the mouse right-click that normally pops up a drop down selection menu is no more, which gave me much frustration, hence the book.
But once you get a hang of it, and its normally not that long if you have to submit a progress report to the boss 5 days just after you installed the new Office, you'll suddenly realize that the menus and location of the buttons are really intuitive and logical - and how come Microsoft took so long to make this change. Really, the unlearning of 2003 is harder than the learning of 2007. I strongly recommend upgrading Office if you use it daily. It does things better and faster.
5 things I love about the new Office:
1. The instant formatting options where you have this list of pre-saved 'templates' that you can instantly apply on your document. One click to professional looking documents and presentations.
2. Powerpoint templates, backgrounds, and picture enhancements really rock. Plus the size of xml files for all Office documents are smaller than 2003.
3. The one click graph creation button in Excel. Excel intuitively selects data and plots the graph in one click. You then make adjustments from the graph ribbon. So much easier than 2003.
4. Save as... You can now in any Office program save your file as a PDF, not needing Acrobat to load and do it.
5. Its cheap! Office 2007 Professional Plus goes only for S$119 for needy guys like me on campus. Thats alot cheaper than the S$700+ retail price out there.
Then of course there's the flip problem of having to use another pc with Office 2003 in it. Got to learn to dual boot now...
Just in case someone doesnt know what 'thick' means
Just some info on my current PC setup:
AMD Athlon 3000+
nForce 800Mhz FSB
DDR400 512Mb x 2
Geforce PCX5300 128Mb
HDD: 80Gb Seagate 5400rpm, 200Gb Seagate 7200rpm
Philips 170B
Kinda happy with it LAST year. But now as I look at it, sighs.... only 3000+? I'm drooling over the 64-X2 which the motherboard can support, and the best they have is a 5000+; which is a total of 10,000Mhz compared to my lowly single core 3,000. Then there's only 1Gb RAM which makes my Office 2007 almost only trot compared to the blazing performance with office03. Want another Gb or two. And GeForce just released the 8800 series....argh.... the GTS has a whooping 640Mb, Thats half the amount of RAM I currently have on board. What a disgrace.
But where is the gratefulness I should be showing for being able to buy and set up my own pc? Half way around the world people are still on 56k modems and probably a PIII. Contentment. I sorely lack that in this ever evolving nucleus country of cutting edge technology, so sharp, the knife cuts the hand that tries to catch it falling. I always wonder, which is greater, to be contended with what I have and live it out or chase the Joneses and live it up. Better to be the 'pop', the 'in', the 'hip' or the 'getting through'?. Maybe there's no right or wrong, like the thousands of other questions people ask these days. Situational ethics, conditional provisions. I just feel myself so sucked into this materialistic world.
God save me...
Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Germ Laboratory
by Michael Christopher Carroll
Just finished this book a couple of hours ago and found it a pretty good read. Got it for S$8 at a book warehouse sale months ago. The reason why I picked it up is because the synopsis talked about West Nile, which I am working on in the lab.
However, West Nile is covered only sparingly in the book, instead, the author talks alot about other diseases like Foot and Mouth, Anthrax, and Lyme. The book isnt primarily about diseases, its about a federal lab that was not well run. At first part of the army then handed over to the FDA and just recently to the Homeland Security, the lab languishes because of inadequate funding, lack of trained personnel and self-centered directors.
At first the army with its fat budget raises up the lab (against public will) and tests out really biohazzardous viruses in the hope of creating a bioweapon. Still, its ok because the island was well guarded and had strict biosafety rules. Then decades later, it gets transfered to FDA who starts flaunting the rules by terrible safety lapses, cuts in budget which means the already old buildings cant even be kept in shape with decontamination facilities and electricity failing frequently. Then there was two admitted incidences of a virus leak, scores of personnel who came down with strange diseases and directors who are just too self centered to care for the island or who dont give an atom about safety ( in the name of doing better science).
So the island starts to collapse as the 1930's built infrastructure not just cant be upgraded, it could not even be maintained. The FDA privatizes the island's running, causing dissent amongst long serving workers and cost cutting in safety spending. Politicians, local leaders, scientists, media and even the island's own people start speaking up against the lab but still nothing happens. (the government cant sue itself). There was also a biological meltdown when a hurricane hit the island and another time some viruses leached from the lab to infect clean animals on the island outside the labs.
When the book comes to a close, I expected it all to be ironed out and the "happily ever after" but not so for this lab. Its still functioning at a low budget and the list of biologicals they handle and the safety levels it operates at is still anyone's guess.
I felt the book was very informative although I spotted a couple of misexpressed scientific terms. One which I remember is when the author said prions were DNA in nature, which is false as its actually a protein. The other one had to do with transfection in bacteria but I cannot remember the exact fault.
As one who actually handles viruses (though attenuated strains), this book is a reminder that people outside the lab constantly view the closed doors with curiosity and if not given correct information from inside, they will formulate their own stories. The other thing is responsibility of scientists to be cautious with infectious and transmissible living things that could escape the lab, no matter how docile.
It was an eye opener because the book tells of two breakthroughs Lab 257 had in its research (diamonds lost in the mud of mess it came to). It was the first to proof that a recombinant protein could be made into a vaccine (one of the staff in my lab is also doing the same thing, when i read this part, I went WOW!!) and secondly they created a rapid detection kit for Foot and Mouth disease that only takes 90 minutes compared to the traditional 2 days. The other interesting thing to me was the lab's connection with Fort Detrick which has been renamed the US army medical research for infectious disease. The fort that once tried to create bioweapons now publishes peer-reviewed journals that I come across so often when reading up on the latest West Nile research.
I was always wondering why the heck the army was playing with the same virus I was researching on...
rEdEsIgnIng sItE.
mAy tAkE sOmE tImE.
sItE mAy lOOk Ugly.
plEAsE bEAr.
Was helping out at the Festival of Praise 2007 at the indoor stadium last week. Delirious and Don Moen were there. The sound level was certainly >120db. Had a bottle of mineral water on a shelf and everytime the kick drum went, you could see ripples on water surface inside the bottle. Kinda scary thinking of the power of those array speakers and subwoofers.
