Blog Action Day 2009: Climate Change

This year, I have decided to participate in the Blog Action Day, which focuses on climate change for 2009. You can read more about it here ~ www.blogactionday.org.

Every year, climate change remains an important part of global environmental topics and this year is no different. In Singapore, the National Environment Agency put up its own climate change programme with the slogan, "Fight Climate Change, Conserve Energy, Save Money". You can view the website here ~ National Environment Agency.

Climate change affects humanity in a number of ways. It can range from the change in weather temperature to rising sea levels to increment in cost of food. In relative to Singapore, a change in weather would meant we are getting hotter days/nights and rainier storms. This could have an adverse effect on our health, causing us to suffer from heatstroke or colds and flus.

As for cost of food, we citizens are affected directly in the pocket as we import most of our food from outside countries. Climate change can cause vegetation to wither and die, thus resulting in lesser food and pushing up the selling prices for these vegetables and fruits. Even life-stocks such as meat and fish are not spared either.

This in turn will cause our cost of living to increase and our disposable income will be affected. When that happens, consumer overall spending will decrease and in turn our national GDP will be affected and reduced.

From this we can see how a tiny change in temperature can escalate into serious national problem. When that happens, it could affect the whole global environment. That is why we need to address the issue of climate change urgently in order to prevent such a scenario from happening.

What we can do on our part as a ciziten of this Earth is to use more efficient ways to use energy to reduce our carbon footprints to help fight climate change. NEA provides some little tips that can help us in our daily lives so that we can help in the cause of climate change. There is also a little energy challenge booklet that can be downloaded for more tips on energy saving tips.

For my own part, I use fan to cool my room instead of an air-con unit but I don't own an air-con unit in my house anyway. I also use energy-saving light bulbs for lightings in my house to reduce the energy usage. These are the small little things that I can help to contribute to fight the climate change.

What about you? Please help to do your part in whatever you can to help save our mother earth. We only have 1 mother earth and it is up to us to save it with our own efforts.

Oil Prices Dropped to Lowest Since 2005

Here's a piece of good news for all of us: According to AFP News, the oil prices has dropped to the levels last seen in Year 2005 at 43.67 dollars a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

In London, Brent North Sea crude for delivery in January fell 3.16 dollars to settle at 42.28 dollars on the InterContinental Exchange, also at the lowest since January 2005.

In intraday trade the New York contract fell as low as 43.51 dollars and the London contract dropped to 42.04.

This is good news for all of us who have been weathering against the economic downturn ever since a few months ago. On top of that, oil prices used to record at sky high prices which led many transport companies to increase their fares and this hurt our pockets deeply. Electricity at home also cost more since the increment of at least 25% on our monthly bills.

In short, we could barely survive with the high oil prices pushing everything else up. From food to transport to leisure to electricity to our basic daily needs. Prices could only go up and up.

However with the decrease in oil prices, we could possibly see a ray of hope shining through our despairs. Due to the falling oil prices, the transport companies, mainly the taxi companies, cut back on charging the oil surcharge to customers.

As for the electricity at home, it is most likely that the lower oil prices will result in lower electricity bills in the next few coming months and that's a relief for us. Money is hard to come by and every saved cents counts a lot.

Hopefully the situation will improve over time as it's not easy to get out of an economic crisis as serious as this current one. But nonetheless, we still can hope for more rays of hope to shine through our lives in the near future.

=D

A Short Update on my 6 cells battery

I have just collected my 6 cells 5200 mAH battery from Corbell yesterday and left it to charge for around 10 hours.

Today is my first discharge and I started using my Wind at around 2.13pm and the battery has lasted till now, and the time reads 9.16pm.

That's like 7 hours of usage for me, with the brightness level set to minimum and with only WIFI turned on. Nothing else. All I did was just web surfing, which is my main purpose of getting the Wind.

Now my battery indicator tells me that I'm left with around 12% of power or about 33 minutes of usage time. Wee!

So far, I have been very pleased with my new battery set & coupled together with my existing 3 cells battery, I can safely chucked my power adaptor at home without any worries of running out of battery power.

Now, MSI should have done this a long time ago and not make users wait infinitely for the 6 cells battery to arrive. That was such a torture. With my 3 cells battery producing only 90 minutes worth of battery life, I am literally bound to my room AND to the power adaptor. Not an amusing thing, I can tell ya that.

So, all in all, this 6 cells battery is a worthy bargain @ $99 for early adoptors. Now I'm truly mobile! w00t!

Yay! I finally gets my new Wind!

It has been a very long wait for this baby to come along. I had placed order for it in early June and was told that the estimated date of arrival is in July. Finally, after a month of waiting, my baby has come.

Ladies and gentlemen, here comes the MSI Wind.

I received the much awaited phone call from M/s Corbell yesterday afternoon to notify me of my wind's collection. How I wish I could go down to the office immediately to take the wind but it was not yet time for dismissal and their office hours are the same as mine. *sighs* I could only wait till today in order to go down and collect my wind.

And so, after 1 whole day of charging the batteries, I finally get to tinker with my new baby. Here are some pictures that I took of my new Wind: -

My Wind in comparison to my Sony Ericsson K800i

I bought the Wind for $864 with an upgrade of my existing 1GB RAM to 2GB RAM. Besides using the latest Intel Atom chipset, my Wind also has a 80GB hard disk, wifi, bluetooth, 1.3MP webcam, 3 USB ports, 1 ethernet port, 1 kensington lock port, 1 vga port, 1 mic port, 1 headphones port and a 10.1 inch screen. For the operating system, it comes packaged with Window XP home basic, which I prefer to use. =)

Setting up a wifi connection by myself sounds very daunting to me and I went about doing it pretty much reliance on a CD. This CD is supplied together in the package of the Linksys wireless router that I specially bought for use with my Wind. Now I can happily say that everything went well, from the connection to the security of my network. Now both my desktop and laptop get to surf Internet without any worries. Wee! =)

The only bad thing about the Wind is that it has a short battery life with the supplied 3-cell battery. If I were to wait for the 6-cell version, it would be another long wait again for its expected release period is September. Plus MSI has this bad habit of pushing back the release date so I decided to take the 3-cell version. I can't bear the long wait again. But the battery power life really sucks big time.

Other than that, everything is good. The keyboard is manageable. The screen is also relatively good. I don't own a EEE PC so I can't really compare the two netbooks together.

Nonetheless, I am loving my Wind a lot and since it's supposed to be power-saving, I am going to be using it more often than my Acer desktop. This should help to save a bit of electricity.

With the upgraded 2GB RAM, I am seeing a fast response to my applications as well. Unlike my 512MB RAM Acer desktop which works so slowly. Everything is so zippy on the Wind and I am more than delighted at its performance. Though the webcam is not quite good and the mic doesn't capture my voice at all. So when I tried out video-conferencing with Mayi, she can't hear what I'm saying and the image freezes occasionally.

All in all, I would say it has been really worth it. I don't regret buying this netbook and I hope it will be a faithful companion to me the way my Acer desktop is.

Sick of my Family

I am so tired, man. How I wish I can leave my family right now. My parents have no thoughts for me. All they care is about themselves and that stupid TOTO and 4-D. How I wish I can bomb Singapore Pools right now so that my mum would stop all those gambling and start caring about me.

It's so tiring trying to talk to her when all she's interested in are those stupid numbers. Each time I try to start a conversation with her, she would be busy drawing dots on those betting slips and ignore me.

Yet she would go on and on about nagging me for the usage of the electricity in the house. Everytime I start to use my computer, she would nag on and on about how expensive electricity is and how I should stop playing. Heck, I gave her money to pay the bills and she still complains.

Just now all I wanted to do was to watch TV and she complained about wasting electricity again. Damn her. Before I wanted to watch TV, she was already using it to see the 4-D results. All my expensive, dear Samsung LCD TV is good for is for her to see the TOTO and 4-D results. Boy, I really hate it.

Playing my computer and watching TV are the only things I can do in this cold household to while away the time.

Does winning those numbers mean more to her than me? She is wasting so much money by giving all those money to Singapore Pools. I rather not give her money if that's the way she wants to spend it. Gambling is such a horrible habit and she still can't kick it off.

When she finally dies, I will burn her all the TOTO and 4-D slips instead of hell money. She doesn't need anything else except for those papers. I hope she will win the grand draw in hell.

Pui!