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Thu 10 Jan 2008 Shifted to otterman.wordpress.comCategory : mac and the internet This site has been loading too slowly for quite some time now and the server has been resisting TextWrangler posts via FTP, so I am finally shifted to otterman.wordpress.com which I just setup. If you bookmarked this page as blog.sivasothi.com then you needn't change anything. That URL will point to the wordpress page in an hour or so. If you are subscribed to my RSS feed at feeds.feedburner.com/OttermanSpeaks, that will be updated too. A blog is a very useful thing I hardly blogged this past month, but I found myself searching my blog for various bits of information. I have also had to point students and non-blog reading friends to specific posts for purposes of both work and play. A journal of events, links, alerts and information is pretty useful and cannot be adequately replaced just by jaiku, del.icio.us and flickr. Bye bye Samzdat I will miss my unique and fast blogging method with the Samizdat engine that Bernard Teo introduced me to 2003. I've stuck to this engine stubbornly, and got help to fix the date/time stamp, battled to fix the rss feed and finally integrated haloscan comments. Then I used it for Habitatnews and Raffles Museum News. The latter was to Wordpress when I left the museum but Habitatnews is still standing. I will probably shift that too. So its sayonara Samizdat, after four years of wonderful service! MarsEdit takes just seconds to set up and post to wordpress or blogger, a very useful thing with my various project and module blogs. It eclipses ecto (for simple users) so I finally started using it in 2007. When I could not figure out how to edit this blog with it, I decided to switch by year-end. I am content at least that gadget man Kevin opportunistically filmed me blogging and produced a very nice clip you can find all over the net! Tue 01 Jan 2008 Singapore celebrates the International Year of the Reef in 2008Category : Singapore Naturalist Happy New Year everyone! I have a had a nice break cycling more and catching up on movies and reading. Back to the burner tomorrow. I will be shifting this blog in January. If you've bookmarked the URL at http://blog.sivasothi.com or have the feed as http://feeds.feedburner.com/OttermanSpeaks, you needn't do anything, it'll all get redirected accordingly. Meanwhile, the big effort by the marine community is IYOR'08 (see the banner below). Ria has prepared a lovely webpage to consolidate the plans. I will concentrate on ensuring the International Coastal Cleanup Singapore is done right, highlighting IYOR events and resources to our students and advising on a couple of projects.  Fri 21 Dec 2007 Theresa on the RidgeCategory : Singapore Naturalist Explaining tools to Theresa
Tue 18 Dec 2007 Its tough to cycle on grassCategory : cycling Not the park connector (some routes in Pasir Ris have obviously changed).
A surrealistic moment in the park conector.
All Lekowala's photos from today. Tue 18 Dec 2007 "Oh, we're just heading to Changi Village for breakfast."Category : cycling This strapping chap at the Loyang Park Connector was chatting with Lekowala and me at a traffic light, just before we reached Changi Village. I asked him what he was up to on his road bike. "Oh, just a bit of cardio."
"What about you guys?"
I glanced at Lekowala, and with a little sigh said, "oh we're just heading to Changi Village for breakfast."
What an anti-climax. "Where from?"
"Oh, he rode down from Seng Kang and I came from Holland Village."
His eyebrows arched in surprise. "That's a decent workout!"
We all sped off and Lekowala and I figured we'd earned our prata telur today.
HV - MacRitchie - Tampines - Changi - ECP - Shenton Way - West Coast - South Buona Vista - HV: Distance: 84.19km, Time: 4:48:11, Averag speed: 17.5km/h, Maximum speeds 50km/h+ (speedo actually said 270km/h, heh-heh).
See Lekowala's post. Sat 15 Dec 2007 Cycling todayCategory : cycling 5.59AM - I'm heading out to Holland Road, Farer Road, Lornie Road, Bradell Road, Boundary Road, hmm..then Tampines Road, Old Tampines Road - Pasir Ris, Loyang Avenue - Changi Village (breakfast) - then the ECP - Shenton Way, Pasir Panjang and back. The weather? *checks NEA webpage* Update - Phew! Rain held, lovely weather. One rider bailed so there was no pickup along Boundary Road but Lekowala, who was early from Seng Kang, met us at the junction of Pasir Ris Drive 3 and Loyang Avenue along the Loyang Park Connector.  We slowed at this point, enjoying the park connector and looking at the way they have labeled the route with distance markers, notices to dismount and push at junctions and the "PCN" signs. Loyang Avenue (Pasir Ris to Changi) used to be a dangerous road where drivers of cars and large vehicles behave with recklessness. Now. however, with the Loyang Park Connector, there is a surrealistic serene and scenic route anyone can take - a safe haven and treat for cyclists and joggers alike.  It has a few twists and turns on the way to Changi so you have to be alert. One section even leads across the road and comes back later before turning left into Cranwell Road and Netheravon Road past the Sindora wallachi and other heritage trees of Changi. Luckily Ladybug was more alert than either of us and kept yelling directions. In some sections, the route follows a platform above tree roots, much like the way walking routes are protected from hikers in Buit Timah. Nice!  Breakfast at Changi was not set amidst the oily, sinful hawker centre, but instead the dosai shop along Changi Village Road. There we had the sort of Zendogs chat we have missed so much and an hour later (!) went to "Mr Bikes Enterprise."  The three of us were enthusiastic and variously bought some long-awaited accessories - a helmet, sidestand, phone holder, rear-view mirrors and a bell. I chatted with the owner, Jansen and realised I could rent bikes for the Pedal Ubin guides here and take them for a spin along the PCN, since we usually only ride on Ubin. I can also fit them out with Prowell helmets since Jansen carries them. The Coastal Park Connector is amazing!! It is part of the Eastern Coastal Park Connector Network which was recently officially launched (see my Cycling in Singapore blog) with all parts finally completed.  This safe haven for leisure cyclists from Changi to East Coast is mind-boggling after decades of unnerving, bullying vehicles who would pass by closely at high speed. Night were not safe with the possibility of drunk drivers. Add to that the bumpiness of the speed regulating strips and hard sea almond fruits threatening to toss a cyclist, it is not suitable for leisure cyclists. I remember pulling back a group of cyclists for safety and the sight of a passing truck convinced everyone! Leisure cyclists were thus hemmed in at East Coast Park.  Now, however, Changi and East Coast are all connected by a smooth wide lane. Many users were up and about today and they were all smiling at each other! You can see they are really happy and were grateful for this connector. Several of them were even stopping to chat, safely away from the road. Next to us, the heavy vehicles thundered past as usual! And the final connection to ECP that involved pulling out to the road? It's yet a another scenic ride with a view of the sea straits and reclaimed land.  We met Dinesh coming in the opposite direction along and he joined us all the way to Kallang. Once we reached East Coast, however, Dinesh confessed he was hungry from not having breakfast and we relented hapily and soon piled our table with gado-gado, mee soto and nasi ayam - the single dosai earlier was simply not enough to sustain us! Anwyay it was lunch time. Dinesh shocked us by settling for sugarcane juice but eventually relented and another gado-gado joined the ranks. All that lost calories were gained, with interest, so we told him not to mix with the wrong company. Sigh! Adrian left via the Amber Road underpass to head north and Dinesh left at Kallang after a brief vsit to the Waterways Watch Society's HQ. Our ride back was, by now, off the PCN, through Shenton Way and Chinatown so theer was no more peace but we like urban cycling. In fact, briefly along Havelock Road and Ganges Avenue, we raced a yellow Lamborghini - the traffic lights kept it competitive but the car finally pulled away on a long empty stretch as we approached Alexandra Road when a green wave of traffic lights beckoned. Bike stats
Route: 6.30am - 1.45pm - a true Zendog ride so breaks were full of interesting conversations and spiced with Gado-gado, dosai and mee soto!
It's pouring now, and I'm going to snooze. 5.39pm - Lekowala posted about the ride, our photos are on Flickr and I updated this post. Tue 11 Dec 2007 Xylo from the mangrovesCategory : meow Was just telling a few friends about how Xylo came to me in the mangroves.
Links are all in this blog post, "All about Xylo," 19 Apr 2007. And this is the link for all blog posts with Xylo's name.
Thu 06 Dec 2007 Tiger the ticked tabby!Category : meow Jane_S (flickr), the admin for a Flickr group called Ticked Tabbies spotted Tiger amidst a batch of handphone photos I uploaded and invited me in. Well, doesn't that point to the importance of labelling your photos, even mildly with single relevant words, like, in this instance, cats!  I'd better go sleep but later I will find out more about this.
Tue 04 Dec 2007 Truth be Told DVDs now on saleCategory : life in Singapore Jen Nee has announced that DVDs of "Truth Be Told" are out. See "A Nutshell Review" for an enthusiastic review and the embedded trailers. I found out after VanTan pointed me to Yvonne's Quit Journey.  Sun 02 Dec 2007 Deleting locked files in OS XCategory : mac and the internet When Ivan emptied his Trash folder, he found the process interrupted by the dialog "The operation cannot be completed because the xxx is locked". It seems the Windows Media Player application he deleted contained several locked files that kept interrupting the trash-emptying process. I responded to his query on the me@n list and later elaborated. It felt so much like the 90's when me@ners used to exchange tips and tricks online. These days there are countless webpages and blogs that provide a lot of information, and often with lovely graphics, so this sort of exchange has become less common. Well, this is what we talked about: cmd-option-shift-delete has been around since at least since OS8 (1998). I don't know if it was in System 7; anyone know?Read more ...
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