Ho John Lee’s Weblog

It’s difficult to get a sense of scale with natural phenomenon, including weather disasters, since they’re so much larger than what we normally deal with in every day life. There is some amazing before-and-after satellite imagery of the recent cyclone in Myanmar (Burma), in which the flooding in the river delta areas is clearly visible. For comparison, I’ve made a Google Maps view of the Bay Area in a similar (not identical) scale. The NASA imagery has a 25km reference scale, the Google Maps image I’ve scaled here was originally at 20km reference scale.

Singapore’s Changi Airport is one of my favorites for long haul travel, as they have everything you need within the security perimeter, including the equivalent of a shopping mall, two gyms, two hotels, assorted restaurants, and excellent, inexpensive internet and telephone service. I wrote about it a while back in Camping out at Singapore Airport, and it looks like there are a couple who have more or less taken up residence there, according to AsiaOne Travel.

SINGAPORE may have its own version of Tom Hanks in the 2004 Steven Spielberg-directed comedydrama, The Terminal. This time though, it’s an Asian-looking pair apparently living and camping out at Changi Airport Terminal 2.

Assorted comments in the AsiaOne forum.

Happy Lunar New Year. It’s the Year of the Pig.

Some are predicting conflict and misfortune:

“The Year of the Pig will not be very peaceful,” said Hong Kong feng shui master Raymond Lo…Pig years can be turbulent because they are dominated by fire and water, conflicting elements that tend to cause havoc, Lo said.

“Fire sitting on water is a symbol of conflict and skirmish,” he said. “We’ll also see more fire disasters and bombings.”

He noted that the Russian AK-47 rifle, a weapon of choice among insurgents around the world, was invented during a pig year.

“So it will not be surprising to see more gunbattles, murder with guns and bombing attacks in 2007,” he said.

Others see a good year for finance:

“Because of the water element in the Year of the Pig, the economy will continue to grow, which also paves the way for another round of interest rate hikes,” said Peter So, a celebrity fortuneteller in Hong Kong.

I’ve been on flights through bumpy weather many times, but am happy to have missed this one. The nosecone (which houses the radar) came off, and there were cracks and holes in the wings and windshield.

‘’I could not see anything through the front windows because they were shattered. So I checked side windows when I tried to land the plane.'’

All 200 passengers, including 177 elementary school kids, were uninjured.
Link, with video. (Reuters)

Asiatotal.net, a Hong Kong-based company, is planning to distribute “iT”:

iT is a compact, ultra-simple, portable desk top computer complete with everything necessary to connect to the Internet, home entertainment devices, printer, USB card reader for reading the memory cards of digital cameras and many other USB peripherals.

It has been developed, designed and manufactured to be distributed free in order to enhance the lives of the millions of people in the world who - for economic reasons - are not connected to the Internet. A way to move them out of the digital underclass.

The device is based on Windows CE, and comes preloaded with IE6.

From the Business Standard:

This device has a conventional keyboard with 14 additional keys, 10 of which will be sponsored by firms that want to tap rural markets, like a firm selling seeds or crop insurance. By pressing the relevant “hot key”, farmers can directly access firms’ websites where product information will guide them to making the right purchase.