iphoting's Sink

Yesterday, I forgot to mention all things that I’ve observed in this daily life. The chemistry of an organisation is quite important. I find it quite alarming that there are times when the pair of hands refuse to do what the brain orders it to do. Upon further ultimatums by the brain, against the professional advice of the pair of hands, orders the pair of hands to go ahead and do what the brain demands.

Imagine the day when the pair of hands go on strike.

Not checking further would certainly get into a sticky situation; and that situation is nearing.

What goofy. I’ve finally found the authors of various blogs; one that deals with coffee spoons, another with cows and another with professional matters. That certainly took longer than I thought I would need on retrospect.

This afternoon was well spent, debating the constrains of free speech. Between the two opposing camps, various possible reasons were examined to see whichever side did better. However, referring to recent prosecuted cases, this line of constraint became much muddier and grey. In fact, some of us find it a little trivial for someone to be convicted of opinion crime. After all, Glasnost did indeed bring down a regime and ushered in a new era of change.

While searching around guano’s site, I came across this podcast, created “by The Cow Shooters to highlight the nature of Life around them”. It’s quite amusing.

Today’s noon day P. E. lesson is a change. We were told to bring along sun block and water bottles to prevent dehydration and heat stroke.

Anyway, I’m off to read up on Chemistry once again.

This morning, I arrived before the junction of North Bona Vista Road and Dover Road at 7.14 am. By the time I walked past the gates of the driveway, it was 7.27 am. Using simple mathematics, it took me approximately 13 minutes to travel through Dover Road and based on my rough estimation, the stretch of road is barely 1 kilometres long. The problem is that the time taken to walk along this road and the time taken for cars to travel along this road is roughly the same. Hence, there’s nothing people can do to jump the traffic and save time. By the way, I’m already leaving my house 20 minutes earlier compared to the time I did 3 years ago. Despite the departure time adjustment, I only managed to arrive at about the same time, sometimes later. Next year, 30 minutes earlier, compared to 3 years ago, might barely make the cut; surely, this is not conducive in any way. Something needs to be done; we can’t be leaving our houses earlier and earlier every year and yet just arriving in time.

Interestingly, adventure told me that the traffic condition is just as bad at 7.05 am.

Think of it as a bottle with a narrow neck. The more liquid water one attempts to squeeze in, the longer the time it takes. By bringing forth the time required for the bottle to be filled by, and yet at the same time increasing the volume of the water to be filled makes it a very tight situation.

“Start filling it up earlier,” I hear some of you think.

Well then, I tell you, it’s not that easy. Put it this way. In days of yore, the timeframe that people start arriving is between 6.50 am to 7.35 am. However, with new limitations currently, the timeframe remains, albeit with the ending time merged in, i.e., 6.50 am to 7.25 am. With simple mathematics, one can easily tell that in order to fit a greater volume in shorter amount of time, the rate of flow has to be increased. However, the road is still 2 lanes wide and the drop off point is only along the bus stop and/or the roundabout.

The problem with the roundabout is that the rate of flow there is limited by the traffic light at the junction of the driveway, governed by the traffic light.

If I hear you respond with, “alight by the bus stop,” I can safely tell that you 1) don’t take bus; 2) never alighted along the bus stop at the said timeframe; 3) don’t realise that it’s a bus stop and not a car stop; 4) have never seen the traffic situation there; 5) live in the boarding school; 6) don’t know what danger is.

Strangely, a feasibility study was indeed conducted before and the it recommended 7.40 am as the optimum time for assembly then (> 4 years ago). Were the recommendations thrown out of the door and reversed? Or maybe in the first place, there wasn’t such a study?

However, instead of complaining and commenting all the time, I have decided that suggestions must accompany. The solution is quite simple but it requires a lot of paper work and possibly money.

We are blessed that Dover Road is long and ample distance is available before major traffic junctions. A long but simple drive-thru, a la taxi stand or bus bay style, also used in ACS (J), preferably with shelter, and at least 5 car lengths, be constructed slightly after the bus stop. This is theoretically possible should enough support and elbow wrenching be done. This eliminates the need for a traffic light bottle neck and will allow buses and cars to stop at respective areas. Also, with the length of approximately 5 cars, slightly more than 7 cars can be cleared at every (drop off) interval. This will eliminate the haphazard and dangerous drop off methods currently employed at the current bus stop; any single accident, major or minor would definitely cause traffic to come to a standstill, making the situation worse.

If not, a dedicated left-turn lane (widen a part of the road) into the driveway and longer (left and exit) turning green times where at least 20 cars can zoom in or out might help. This only works if every car that enters the compound drops off wherever.

This would roughly equate to 65 cars cleared every 2 drop off intervals.

But then again, I can bet that these suggestions would never be implemented.

Confirmed. The new ties in this exchange was a crest without the Boss trademark. Material is slightly different but the only consolation is the width that is narrower.

I’ve a bunch of links in my outbox folder that I’d like to share but I’m too tired to post it here now. Maybe tomorrow. I’ll see how my P.E. period at noon goes.

Today is certainly the most saddening school reopening day. Perhaps saddening is an understatement. We had an amusing shareholder’s meeting at the most inopportune time. Surprisingly, it took quite a while before the audience realised that the intended target audience of the report was incorrect. I was taken aback when we were told that over 95% of people surveyed were happy about the establishment, or something to that effect. The main question was, what survey? The few years ago, probably 2 years, top secret survey conducted in the computer labs? Haven’t half the population that did the survey have disappeared by now?

Following, the donation announcement was rather amusing. “You will put a donation into the envelope”.

The auditorium was badly designed at best. I have to sadly say that the characters on the stage cannot be seen clearly from the circle seats. Maybe I’m just one of the 74% people who have myopia in this country. What’s really wrong is that the auxiliary screens are too high up; even people seated on the last row consider the screen too high and out of sight, defeating their intended purpose. Throughout the whole meeting, I was pondering how a live camera system could improve the situation, but there wasn’t anywhere that the cameras can be mounted such that the speaker can be seen clearly. Even if there’s a place, it is unlikely that the broadcasting server can be sited there with direct video connection to projectors. Terrible design. Nothing much can be done without large amounts of money. In short, professionals need to be called in.

Overall, it is the first time I’ve felt the establishment degrade so much in such a short time. I was told that a large number of staff left for good.

Adventure and I were chatting in the afternoon and he told me that the ties are to be swapped for another set which apparently had the crest, without the Boss trademark. This makes me wonder why. What’s wrong with genuine Boss ties?

Looks like I’ll wait and see.

This thing called education really exhausts me. Upon arriving home from school, I’m so tried that I’m unable to do much work. I find my mind in a state of low-power, not enough energy mode.

I shall call for divine intervention.

Postscript: We came to the conclusion that most National UYO people (no offence intended; exceptions present) tend to be more simple minded.

I’m currently at the Central Lending Library and have finished setting up a VPN connection to my home. This way, I get relatively faster surfing speeds using the free iCell WiFi. Alright, I’ll resume my Chinese nuisance now.

Today is a day of errands. Spent well over 2 hours doing housekeeping matters such as shopping for EE necessities, going for a nice hair cut and visiting the library to do some literature review for my EE.

Before that, I used the short span of the morning playing Warcraft 3: Frozen Throne on my Mac. The performance of the Intel GMA 950 has been impressive. Running with Rosetta (WC3 is a PPC binary), medium graphics and on a 1024 by 600 resolution, lags were surprisingly not seen. I’m glad that this Macbook performed well in my (bank)books. Hence, this will finally be a Lanparty capable machine.

At my favourite hair management shop, I overheard the hair stylists chatting casually among each other, in Cantonese. They were like talking bad about their boss over his newly acquired cash register which was amazingly troublesome to operate. Moments later, it generated into how lousy the radio (poor reception) and how he (my hair stylist) wanted to just walk to the radio and use the scissors to cut off the wires. The analogies and slangs used in the said language made my day well.

After that, I visited the Regional Library which I’m not very fond of to return a book. Walking between the narrow aisles of library shelves, locating an out-of-place book and enjoying the presence of immense wisdom surrounding one, brings me great joy and hope to life. Imagine the days before OPAC was available for public use; those cards and indexes. I marvel at how technology has amazingly changed the way of life. Spent hours there digging up Physics related books, jotting down their details for use in my EE bibliography.

Updated my blog manager and now it supports Akismet for comments. Perfect as I don’t have to manually delete suspected spam comment approval requests; that’s what computers are for after all.

Came across this post which I found pretty amusing and it probably reflects a large number people around.

If you do not believe that 0.9999... = 1, please look at this simple proof. Also, here’s something that RIAA/MPAA should take note of.

Oh well, a long day ahead for me tomorrow, and this mid-term study period is about to end, leading to intensive post-mid-term study sessions.

Spent the whole night fixing up links on sites and moving things around the messy web root. Looks like it’s time to lock out all wannabe webmasters from handling any sites.

In other news, we’ve got our very own guide dog and blind man discrimination video. Someone got annoyed by the RIAA and decided to do something good to the community, that is to educate users on music shopping. For more reasons why going original need not be the best thing, check out this commentary.

For a budget and fun project, check out this cool homebrew air conditioner construction howto. It’s a real cheap way of cooling the house on a hot day when air conditioners are too weak.

Here’s a quick test to determine the gender of your brain.

As for cool equipment, check out this chainless bicycle and this funky Stonehenge clock.

Most importantly, Internship Mistakes is a must read for people on their way to work.