Lance Armstrong is making a come back this year after a brief 3 year hiatus. This Tour will interesting, for one the Istana team where Lance is in has not decided who should be the team leader. Amongst the final stages of the Tour lies a big climb on Mount Ventoux, Lance Armstrong has not won with Mount Ventoux in the route.
What is apparent is that he is still in great shape, finishing 10th in the opening stage.
To me, coming back to race (cliched as it might sound), is really a great achievement in itself. Good to think about what we can still do.
Wired magazine did a neat summary of various ways to get updates for the Tour.
Otterman sent me this great web app – dropbox, which basically serves as an online drive where you can access common folders from different computers. Tried it at home and it worked great. Was working on a folder of curriculum stuff and dragged the whole folder to dropbox and its painless and fast.
Was very encouraged and decided on work on my Lower Peirce presentation on the Imac at home and just drag the 32mb keynote presentation into dropbox thinking I can access it in school today. So I stumbled to bed last night happily thinking that no sweat, dropbox works.
Forgot that school network is super slow. The presentation was due at 8am today and the server takes 2 hrs to download a huge file. So I had to redo the presentation again.
Morale of story, dropbox is good, but maybe not for huge files?
Long weekend coming and meeting otterman for a quick chat.
Going to use Superduper to clone the newly formatted macbook pro. Still got a feeling that this program is better than Time machine. Will try it out on the monster 1 terabyte Maxtor.
Had a very interesting conversation with an extremely talented photographer just now. Basic ‘talk shop’ e.g. what lens, when was this taken? How did you get such good colors? etc.
Bruce Percy wrote this. I agree whole heartedly.
The strength of an image lies within the photographer and not with the equipment.
If it were true that it lay with equipment, then we’d all be taking fabulous pictures, but that’s not the case. Some photographers have a way of seeing that is exceptional.
Robert Capa’s war photographs are a perfect example. Technically they’re blurred, fuzzy and taken on films that are poor by today’s standards, yet his images contain a depth and impact that overcome any technical limitations of the equipment that was available to him at that time. This was a man who was obsessed with making powerful images.I believe that if you want to take great photos, you have to invest in finding and developing your style of photography. If you have a desire to create strong images you will do so no matter what the technical limitations are that you are faced with. In fact, often it is these limitations that provide us with the need to experiment, to be inventive and extract as much out the equipment as we can. In other words less is more.
Back to school tomorrow. Hope for a simple term.
Its really an amazing book.
I had to self quarantine myself for the week as I came into contact with a friend whose friend got infected.
So the days at home was spent doing up lessons and reading.
Picked up Microcosm today. Goodness, the level of detail, research and the sequence of the story told is amazing. For a while I felt like Aziraphale in Good Omens, reading The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch.
Progress was slow as I was taking notes at every page. Now at the section where Carl Zimmer was writing about how E. coli made flagellum.
Now hope I have time to finish the rest of the book before school starts. This will definitely be what I be reading in the bus.
Can’t wait for this – 2010
Tioman is good, will sort through photos and update again.
Highlight was probably a small toad found along the Kajang trail around 150m up. Hope to get it identified soon.
New project. Hope this one pulls off. First time I am involved in something like this. Its frightening and exciting at the same time.
More details here – SINTAK Drive to Share
Went down early today to just walk around and look at things. It will be good to just be by yourself, soak in the place and just scan around for interesting things.
The walk in was good, at 7 plus the sun was just rising over tops of a line of trees and you start to hear the birds calling. Could only recognise the kingfisher. Of course I missed having my usual packet of teh tarik from the coffee shop just at the entrance of the road, but well got to deal with it.
The beach itself is empty too, save for 2-3 fishermen at the jetty. The tide was still on its way out, water is really brown and murky and you can see lots of borrows at the beach. Ghost crabs? Got to verify one day.
Quickly changed to my booties, took out my camera and started looking around. Saw a few interesting things and found that I liked my new waterproof camera very much.
Will let the pictures speak for itself for I have mangrove talk to prepare tomorrow.
First Underwater shot of a crab.
I like the macro function.
Nice color contrast
Can you see the crab?
There.
Goby?
Common hairy crab amongst Halophila ovalis
Sighting of the day. Saw this pair of bright orange pincers and long antennae peeking out of a hole. What shrimp is this?
Been a very very long 10 weeks. After next week of first aid course and meetings, will be off tioman.
Things left to do:… Hmm shall not think about them now.
Should really start looking through my slides again for tomorrow’s talk.
This hols will be packed. Jane Goodall is coming on 6 June. 2 days meeting before her symposium. Tioman coming up. Hopefully I get a chance to locate the Johora…
Meanwhile will savor this book.
Your Inner Fish
Neil Shubin
