Uncategorized

Feng-shui

By on Sunday, October 30, 2005

No, this is not about that lame horror movie starring the misguided daughter of an ex-president :P I was just watching a feature on feng-shui on the National Geographic. I find it amazing how feng-shui is so popular. In Hong Kong they build buildings based on it. In fact, there’s a building with a hole on it to allow the dragons of the mountain behind the building to drink at the bay in front of the building. So, thoughtful of them :D And at the HSBC, they have a good luck escalator and a bad luck escalator . The good luck escalator is for employees while the bad luck escalator is for clients. The result is that the bank gets higher revenues. Very comforting thought if you’re a client, huh? :P

In another case of feng-shui strangeness, my finance professor related to use how a financial institution in Hong Kong contracted the services of feng-shui masters to predict the stock market for a certain year. The actual outcome turned out eerily like the predicted outcome. So alike that they contracted the services of the feng-shui masters to do the same for the following year. Although my professor didn’t say what the result for the following year was, he said that they expected that the actual outcome would also follow the predicted outcome. Make you wonder, though, if all those feng-shui believing traders traded, consciously or unconsciously, based on the prediction. A case of a self-fulfilling prophecy. But then, doesn’t superstition work that way?

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Uncategorized

Aquaventure, Anilao, Batangas

By on Monday, October 24, 2005

Went scuba diving with Ren’s group yesterday at Aquaventure Reef Club in Anilao, Batangas. On the first two dives, the visibility was good and there were lots of fishes but the dives were pretty much uninteresting. On the third dive, things got a bit more interesting. As I opened the tank valve when I did my pre-dive check, I heard a loud hissing sound. Investigating it, I saw two or three pinprick-sized holes on the high pressure hose. Ren tried sealing with glue it but the seal won’t hold.

I was thinking of not joining them on the dive but Ren and the others told me it’s nothing to worry about. Since the leak doesn’t seem to be too great and I was assured that there’s no chance of a catastrophic hose rupture, I relented and decided to proceed with the dive. Besides, since the last dive will be shallow, there’s the option of an emergency ascent. Of course, even from a shallow dive still, it still carries the risk of bends. Funny because we were talking about whether we would choose drowning or the bends during lunch. Fortunately, nothing bad happened during the dive. I did stick close to Ren ready to grab his backup regulator if necessary. Call it a precautionary measure ;)

Back at the surface after the dive, I checked the hose again and discovered that it was no longer leaking air. My theory is that the starting tank pressure which was higher than normal– the pressure gauge read 225 bar instead of the usual 200 bar– went above the hose’s age-degraded specification and so leaked. But when the air got used up, the hose was able to handle the lower pressure. I’m not sure if it would have been able to handle the normal 200 bar but considering healthy hoses should be able to handle 300 bar, it definitely needs to be replaced before the next dive.

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Gadgets

Sony Ericsson K700i

By on Friday, October 21, 2005

My Nokia 6100 is now definitely dead. The repair guy said the board has been cracked. No surviving that I guess. It was pretty saddening. The Nokia 6100 is really neat no-frills phone in a small package. Worse is I wasn’t ready to buy a new phone yet. So I put off buying a new phone for several days. Thankfully, Jem lent me his old but still functional Nokia 3530 and I used that for for the meantime while I scoured around for good deals.

The best deal I found was Globe’s zero interest installment promos for existing subscribers where you can pay for your phone via credit card for up to 18 months. Supposedly this is at no interest. Of course the base price are a bit higher than your typical side-street mobile phone vendor. But installment payment sure is hard to beat especially if you have little cash on hand.

I’ve decided beforehand that I will be getting a Sony Ericsson. My first choice was the K750i. I’ve been lusting over this phone for some time. It has good features including a serious 2 megapixel camera. Unfortunately, it’s so good that it’s out of stock in most if not all Globe Centers. Besides, it was rather expensive. My next choice was a K300i. It is a lot less expensive but is a bit too shabbily built for my liking. So I settled for the middle-ground which is the K700i.

For a phone, this basically has everything you would expect: tri-band, hands-free operation, voice commands, SMS, MMS, etc. For connectivity, there’s IR, Bluetooth, GPRS, and USB cable. The only phone feature missing is a speakerphone mode which is rather a bummer but not so much as to earn it negative points. UPDATE: It actually has a speakerphone though it’s a little bit unintuitive to activate.

On the extras side, the influence of Sony is very evident as this is essentially an entertainment phone. It has a media player that can play MP3, MP4, 3GP, and WAV files. It also a radio that uses the headset as an antenna. Both the media player and the radio can be minimized and run on the background.There’s a Java engine for some pretty neat games. There’s a VGA-resolution camera that you can also use to record videos albeit lower resolution. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have external memory card storage which would have been great for music files as the internal memory is only around 40 MB.

And the design is pretty cool too: simple lines, subtle accents, and a silver, gray, and black colored casing. It has Sony Ericsson’s dual-front design: The front of the phone is your traditional vertically-oriented display and keypad but the back of the phone is horizontally-oriented and designed to look like a camera. I actually like the overall design better than the K750i which, although shares the basic shape and design, has a charcoal colored casing.

Definitely a good deal.

Rating: 4/5

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Uncategorized

WRC Fantasies

By on Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Last night, I dreamt I went to this race track. I was just accompanying someone to get a car fixed. I don’t know why we went to a race track for that. Probably because of all those high-performance mechanics there. I really don’t know. Anyway, I somehow ended up in a pit stop in full racing gear. I was just standing there when this red Citroen Xsara WRC drives in and I was pushed/shoved into the passenger side. I glanced at the driver and he was no other than Sebastien Loeb!!!

I quickly told him was that I don’t know squat about co-driving but he seemed all nonchalant and just asked me to do whatever. And he drives off the pit stop. So I went like “Left!” “Right!” “Hard left!” “Hard right!”. I sure didn’t know what I was doing but all the twists and turns sure made it fun and exciting. The race ended for us when I made a mistake calling a turn and we spinned out trying to get back on track.

It may not exactly be WRC because it was on a racetrack (and the fact that it was just a dream :P) but it was a Citroen Xsara WRC and the driver was Loeb. Sure is WRC enough for me. :))

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General

Run Lola, Run

By on Sunday, October 16, 2005

Have you had a bad day? Don’t you just wish you can do it all over again? In this movie, Lola (Franka Potente) did just that, in fact she was able to do it three times. It started with Lola receiving a phone call. Manni, her boyfriend, had lost a bag containing 100,000 marks (it’s a german film) that he was transporting for a crime boss. If he does not deliver the money he is as good as dead. His solution is robbing a store to get replacement money. Lola has only 20 minutes to get replacement money to Manni before he proceeds with his plan. So she had to run and run and run. This is like three short movies rolled into one and the whole thing is exciting and hilarious at the same time.

Oh, and it’s got way cool techno soundtrack:

I wish I was a stranger who wanders down the sky
I wish I was a starship in silence flying by
I wish I was a princess with armies at her hand
I wish I was a ruler who’d make them understand

I wish I was writer who sees what’s yet unseen
I wish I was a prayer expressing what I mean
I wish I was a forest of trees that do not hide
I wish I was a clearing no secrets left inside

I wish I was a hunter in search of different food
I wish I was the animal which fits into that mood
I wish I was a person with unlimited breath
I wish I was a heartbeat that never comes to rest

Rating: 4/5

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