Earthquake 12.09.2007

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I felt some tremors at around 1910 hrs in my office on the 22F at Collyer Quay earlier and I thought I was feeling giddy or that I was going to faint. After all, I hadn’t slept well the past few nights, and I was playing Sudoku under dim light in the office.

So, while everyone else probably ran, I sat on my chair and wait for the feeling to go away, which it did, when the earthquake stopped. And at that point of time I didn’t even know that was an earthquake!

When I reached the ground floor 10 minutes later, my colleague who there said to me, “Next time, run faster. If the building had collapsed it would have killed you.”

Apparently, an earthquake of Magnitude 7.9 occurred at Southern Sumatra at 0610 local time. (Indonesia is one hour behind us.)

This is the second time an earthquake happened and I thought I was fainting. If the building had collapsed it would certainly had killed me as I sat motionless on my chair waiting for the feeling to go away. * sigh *

September 11, 2001

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This is a day I would never have forgotten. It was the day when sub-human terrorists without any regard for the sanctity of human lives, snuffed out the lives of 3000 over innocent people in New York City. And this is the day that the name Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda savages will be cursed forever by many in the civilized world.

I thought it was a joke when my friend – who goes by the handle SanNiang when commenting on my blog – messaged me with the following message, “World Trade Centre in New York collapsed.” My reply was “You must be joking” because I was walking home from the MRT station after a dinner appointment and I have no idea what has happened. His replied arrived when I reached the lift landing, “Go watch the television.”

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the two towers went down before my very eyes on TV – be it CNN, MSNBC, BBC etc. Even then, I thought it was some kind of ‘War of the Worlds’ prank that someone was playing on us. And the only other sign that this was real was an email alert from the company that starts with, “As you are aware, the ongoing terror attacks in New York…”

Initially, my response was simply, “The Americans finally got what they deserved for their foreign policies in the Middle-East”. That’s not mentioning that it wasn’t too long ago that an American P-3 Elint (Electronics Intelligence) aircraft was forced to land by the Chinese PLAAF on Hainan Island in China. I wasn’t particularly pleased with the fact that the Americans went snooping around China’s backyard.

But then I remember that my friend Brian was then working in New York. The terrorists may not have struck here, but they could have gotten people whom I knew. People whom I called friends.

I tried to get Brian on ICQ, but he was offline. And as I did not have his mobile in New York, I could only send an email and hope for the best. Inside me, I was outraged, and only then I understand that regardless of my displeasure with American foreign policies, this particular act of terror was plain wrong. It was completely unjustifiable and unforgivable. A kind of savagery that perhaps even beasts would not have committed.

Anyway, Brian’s reply did come the next morning, thanking me for the concern, and also with the following attachment from his elder brother.

Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 19:55:44 -0400 (NY Time)
From: Ian * email censored *
Subject: I Am Safe

Thank you very much for your outpouring of concern. I was very much in harm’s way but I am safe now.

I was in the lobby of 2 WTC when the initial blast occured to 1 WTC. As you know, I work on the 82nd floor of 2 WTC. I was waiting for the elevator. The express elevator takes folks up to the 78th floor where everyone switches to local elevators for the upper floors.

Upon hearing the blast, I ran out the side door of 2 WTC, which placed me in a strategically bad location in terms of the initial damage because of my angle of view. When I got to the front of the WTC complex (its quite large), I saw people flying out the windows on 1 WTC from what looked like either the 78th floor lobby or from office windows around that floor.

To say the least, it was traumatic seeing people.. human beings… land on the plaza after an 80 floor drop. I was about 150 feet away from the plaza blocked only by police barricades. I closed my eyes upon seeing the first body fly down (I have no idea whether it really was the first), and after two seconds, I realized that there was no escaping reality. After another 6 bodies, I turned away in both disgust and horror. For no apparent reason, I just began walking away from the WTC in shock.

Then, after about 100 feet of walking, I turned around. That was when I actually saw the second plane deliberately hit about the 50th floor of 2 WTC. The first plane had hit quite high up… about the 80th floor of 1 WTC and the damage to 1 WTC looked relatively light compared to the damage this time at 2 WTC. The fireball rose all the way from the middle of 2 WTC to the top of the building. There was no way anyone in the upper half of 2 WTC could live because the incineration was immediate. The smell of jet fuel could not have been more apparent. The plaza smelled a lot like an airport tarmac.

Anyway, when the fireball erupted, debris came flying and I could see objects above my head. I ducked around a corner into the lobby of a smaller building, as did others. I was saved from cuts from flying debris while some others were not so lucky. In truth, the debris was mainly office stationery and nothing heavy or burning.

My military instincts told me to head back to the plaza to help the injured. By this time, the police had descended on the plaza like army ants. I was shooed away and since some of the police were in riot gear and obviously had tear gas, I complied.

My cell phone was useless because the cell site is on top of 1 WTC 🙂 Fortunately, I was standing beside some Euro-type who had a phone which looked like a brick. It happened to be a Global Satellite phone, which the gentleman kindly allowed me to leave my first message with Lezah. Ironically, my phone then rang and my friend was given instruction to contact Lezah and Brian and hang on tight.

I started running away from the building, not really because of fear for debris but for fear of being stampeded by the chaos. Everyone was running. After about 1/2 mile, I stopped running and contemplated my position. What about my colleagues/co-workers?

One mile away, at the Brooklyn Bridge, my heart sank when I saw 2 WTC collapse for real. There wasn’t anything left of the building, which was quite imposing in terms of the downtown skyline.

I walked the 5 miles (not sure) from downtown to midtown because there was no public transportation. I reported to my midtown office and scrammed because its located in Rockerfeller Center(!) The objective was to avoid landmarks and I left one for another. Then, it was to escape and get out of Manhattan.. and the only way was to catch a train at Grand Central.. (a prime target for a bomb). Thankfully, no bombs went off while I was catching a train.

I’m out of the city for now and my instructions from my boss are to stay home and remain by the phone.

The fight against extremism and terrorism must continue, though not in the form of the illegal invasion of Iraq. I am certain, the day that Osama bin Laden gets his own just deserts like many of his henchmen before him, it will be a day well remembered, and a day that many will rejoice in his demise.

It’s only a pity it took so long before he got what he deserved.

BlackBerry Art

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This is some of the things you can do to your old Blackberry. Do a Picasso…

It’s called the blob, the stain, and the eye…

If you don’t understand why it is art… that is not my problem.

Apple – The Hypocrisy That Don’t Get Hyped About

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In spite of the marketing coups that Apple is making again and again with the younger people, I have no love for this company. It doesn’t matter just how cool or even how ‘technologically advance’ and ahead of the times their products might be, it also doesn’t matter if their products is more superior or that it beats competition hands down, I simply couldn’t tolerate the long history of Apple’s one dimensional, anti-market, anti-choice, anti-competition and monoplistic business practices and the hypocrisy.

A lot of people considers Apple as an innovator and a choice against Microsoft, but the fact is, Apple is as monopolistic (and even more so) than Microsoft. It is also anti-choice. Here’s the list of some of Apple’s anti-market, anti-choice, monopolistic actions (found in Google):

  1. a. July 1, 1999: Apple filed a complaint against Future Power and Daewoo for illegally copying the industrial design of Apple’s award-winning iMac computer. The complaint was filed in U.S. Federal Court in San Jose, California, and seeks to enjoin Future Power and Daewoo from distributing computers that illegally copy Apple’s designs, and asks for actual and punitive damages resulting from such illegal conduct.

    b. Aug 19, 1999: Apple Computer has filed a second iMac-inspired lawsuit, this time against low-cost PC maker eMachines, alleging that the company has wrongfully pilfered the design and feel of its popular translucent computer.

    Maybe Ford should sue all the other guys – Benz, Honda, Toyota etc – for pilfering the design and feel of the automobile too. What is there for Apple to fear from FuturePower or eMachines, unless Apple’s products is all just hype, and is just full of style and lacking in substance? Or perhaps, Apple just realized, that other than the design and the hype, that’s really nothing it is offering to users? Why is Apple afraid of letting the market decide on what they want to pay with their own money to put on the desk?

  2. February 4, 2003: A number of Macintosh dealers are suing Apple Computer, charging the computer maker with a host of business wrongs ranging from overbilling to poaching customers to stocking its own stores with new gear unavailable to resellers. Three suits have been filed in recent months by Apple dealers, including San Francisco-based Macadam Computer, Los Angeles-based Computer International, and Oregon-based MacTech Systems. The resellers charge Apple with breach of its contract and fraud, saying the computer maker hurt their business by failing to pay them for repairs they made under warranty, by overcharging them for parts, and by disparaging the dealers to potential customers in an effort to gain more direct sales business.

    And did I mention monopolistic? Here we see an attempt by Apple to drive ‘competition’ out of the business with the above practices. It seems, not only does Apple not like users decide on which product to spend their money, Apple also does not like where users would spend their money after they decide to buy a Mac product! And if you think that’s the end to it, you haven’t seen nothing yet.

  3. December 14, 2004: Apple Computer has quietly updated its iPod software so that songs purchased from RealNetworks’ online music store will no longer play on some of the Mac maker’s MP3 players. The move could render tunes purchased by many iPod owners unplayable on their music players. Apple responded to the announcement of Harmony in a public statement, claiming that Real ‘adopted the tactics and ethics of a hacker to break into the iPod.’

    RealNetworks issued its own statement in response to Apple’s accusations. The company contends that consumers, not Apple, should be the ones controlling which music files can be played on their iPods. And the DMCA is not applicable to Harmony, RealNetworks said, because the antipiracy legislation ‘explicitly allows the creation of interoperable software’.

    Here’s yet another anti-market, anti-consumer action. No wonder one of the MacOS is called Leopard. A leopard definitely doesn’t change it’s spots. Apple would want users to believe that it cares about the users and is giving them what they wanted. But here it is attempting to limit where user want to buy their music from to put into the iPod. The message: iTunes, your only source of music for iPods!

    Is it a surprise RealNetworks released Harmony? It was simply an inevitable outcome because RealNetworks has been trying to get Apple to license it’s Fairplay DRM technology to them for a long time. Apple has continually rebuffed the efforts, and Steve Jobs, while talking out of his ass, says that licensing Apple’s DRM to competitors will make it less secure. The fact: “Microsoft’s Windows Media DRM 10 (marketing name PlaysForSure) has not had more security breaches than FairPlay despite the fact that it has been licensed to dozens of companies”.

  4. January 06, 2005: Thomas William Slattery has filed a class action suit against Apple Computer Inc. in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging Apple is guilty of violating federal antitrust laws and California’s unfair competition law by requiring users who buy music from the iTunes Music Store to use an iPod if they plan to take their music on the road with them. Slattery’s suit cuts to the heart of an ongoing issue related to Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology present in commercial downloaded music.

    Well, well, well. Are there so few people who realize just how evil Apple really is? That is why I hardly bothered with all the hype surrounding Steve Job’s keynote about the iMacs, iPhone, and iPods because in my considered opinion, Apple is a company which will become far, far worse than Microsoft ever will be if it should gain dominance in more fields. And just look at what it is already doing when it had dominance in just one field – digital music?

    In fact, Apple has been screwing consumers from behind without consumers even realizing it. And surprisingly, by the number of blogs and articles hyping about Apple products that consumers are actually loving it! Victory for one-dimensional thinking!!

  5. February 6, 2007: Steve Jobs published a memo about the music industry, iTunes and DRM, the technology used to lock iTunes Store music to Apple’s iPod and iTunes Player. In the memo, Jobs said that ‘DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy’. and offered to embrace a DRM-free music-sales environment ‘in a heartbeat’ if only the big four music companies would let him.

    * YAWN * Yahoo’s Dave Goldberg has long urged the labels to remove the restrictions, and Real’s Rob Glaser said that ‘DRM-free purchases is an idea in ascendance and whose time has come.’

    So wow. Suddenly now Steve Jobs becomes the champion for anti-DRM. Then what was that all about several years back with Harmony, huh? And that’s not mentioning, Steve Jobs has a pretty obvious double standard when it comes to DRM. Jobs has made it clear that when he talked about the death of DRM we’re really only talking about the death of DRM for music. Of course, being the shareholder of Disney, he needs to keep DRM for videos. Just don’t expect Steve Jobs to start railing against DRM for video any time soon.

    Plus the fact is, record companies have lost faith in DRM long before Jobs starts raving about it. And if you need evidence, you only need to see how fast EMI ditched DRM by announcing it’s launch of a DRM-free superior sound quality downloads across its entire digital repertoire less than 2 months later on April 2nd, 2007.

MacFreaks might forget Job’s transgressions or even eat his shit and say that it is fragrant, I just won’t. And I couldn’t because it is the duty of DGDD – Darth Grievous Dark Domain – to report this.

Tribal Wars

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I have played Tribal Wars for well over several months now, probably since mid or late April. It is a browser game I have seldom talked about except with another colleague who found an interest playing after I told him about it, and two other friends who have since quitted. And I also don’t talk about it for good reasons, since I want to experience the game for myself without anyone who thinks he is a pro telling me to do things the way he would do it.

There are several things I noticed in the game:

  • Some players do not seem to understand that things don’t happen instantaneously in the game even though everything they built takes a certain amount of time to complete. They seem to believe they can find strength in numbers or just go along with the strongest. They foolishly think that being in the strongest tribe means they would go far because they will be well protected, without realizing that they are at some god-forsaken corner far from the rest and support will take too long – if not forever – to reach and do them any good when they come under attack. My personal recommendation, join a continental power, and even then, expect that even your neighbour won’t send you any help when you need it.

  • Many players just panicked when under attack. They aren’t even capable of making a decent call for help. ‘I am under attack!! Help!’ is the best they can do. And it is painfully annoying to people who really wanted to help when they found out just how far away this player is, without any idea if their support would arrive in time or not. In summary, no one knows if it’s already a lost cause by the time they read their plead for help.

  • Responses to calls for defense contribution to fellow members under attack can really make one weep. Generally, a tribe is lucky if just 10 – 15% of the players respond and contribute selflessly. The rest will ofen just sticking their heads into the ground like ostriches either by ignoring emails and the game forum. They do so to save their own ass and hope for the storm to go away. And while it is understandable one doesn’t want to send forces too far away as it takes the equal amount of time to recall them back. It is quite commendable because I know of one tribe whereby one cluster of their tribe members in another continent offered support to another cluster on another continent even when they themselves are under threat of attack.

  • Also, a lot calls for co-ordinated attack on enemies also went unheeded and they fell flat even before execution. I felt really sad and sorry for the tribe leaders / members who tried to organize something. In once case, only 5 members replied favourably to a proposal for a concerted attack, while the rest didn’t even bother to read their mails.

  • A lot of players seems to just sit tight and wait for the axe to fall on them when they are attacked, even for those who have more than one village. A common response would be to start building more troops madly, even though the force they need won’t materialise even after the enemy’s attack is done. And by then even whatever defensive forces they had originally would have been reduced to nothing and whatever they built would do them no good anyway. Somehow, I have seen no tribe which would go into an active counter attack with their assault troops – axes and light calvary – just to shake things up a little.

The last point above is the most surprising, because I would have preferred to kill as many troops as I am losing, and if possible do as much damage to enemy village(s) before they take mine. Above which, it almost will delay the attacker’s time table in taking the target village, since the attacker would be quite wary of the remaining troops which can serve as a threat to their nobles, which is the only unit that can conquer a village.

Anyway, if the entire tribe can get down to the act of actively helping in the defense a tribe member, they might as well also get down to actively attacking the attacker’s mustering point(s) to make it difficult for him to launch more attacks. And if the attacking village is taken, then those troops that survived the attack – either on their way back or serving as garrison in the village just taken are removed from the game (for reasons understood only by the makers of the game). Just why it is not done boils down to one simple reason: Self Preservation.

I am quite sure the reason why a lot of players keep a low profile is because of that voice at the back of my mind that is always saying “Are you fxxking nutz? If you send your army to help defend your tribe mate or attack the attacker, you might draw attention to yourself and you end up with your own ass kicked!”

Sure! But sooner or later, when all my tribe mates are gone, my ass will get kicked anyway, right?

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