Earth Hour 2011

What is it?

Uncle Google and Aunty Wiki should be on hand to help  you out in case you still do not know what it is. Excerpt from Wikipedia:

Earth Hour is a global event organized by World Wildlife Fun and is held on the last Saturday of March annually, asking households and businesses to turn off their non-essential lights and other electrical appliances for one hour to raise awareness towards the need to take action on climate change.

For 2011 that special one hour falls on 26th March, from 8.30pm to 9.30pm local time.

A little bit about Earth Hour:

1. Started of in Sydney, Australia in 2007 (2.2mil people participate)
2. In 2008 participation grew to more than 50mil people
3. In 2009 more than 100mil people from over 4000 cities and 88 countries touched the switches.
4. In 2010 enormous responses from more than 128 countries, no estimate given but it should not be less than half a billion people.

Earth hour has transformed into a kind of celebration with a lot of activities towards making the public aware of the need to safeguard earth from negative climate change. Concerts, seminars, workshops, photography contests, beauty pageants, power-saving campaigns; it's like you-name-it-we-have-it kind of thing.

This year DBKK (Kota Kinabalu City Hall) is organising a photography contest. Good opportunity for photographers and hobbyist. I can't take part on this one but would definitely take part on the switching-off of non-essential lights.

Do visit Earth Hour official website and have fun making your very own lantern lights.

This is what I got from there and I like the lantern to be red in colour.

Happy Earth Hour day on 26th March 2011.

Cartoonist - Out of his mind?

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This is the caricature by Selangor born cartoonist, Mohd Zohri Sukimi, 52, better known as Zoy.

I am a Malaysian and am proud to be one but I'm not proud at all with what this cartoonist did.

What was in his mind? Trying to portray that no matter how big and strong you are, you can never match the the hands of God?

I think he was out of his mind! He stooped so lowly to kids-having-fun level and made fun out of it. Out of others' misery. I'm not impressed at all!


Let's put this into perspective:

Ultraman is a character in many TV programs and is well known primarily among children and kids (although some adults watch them as well).
It is therefore, purely for fun and humor, and nothing near reality. Shoving this kind of "brilliance" to Berita Harian readers' throat at this time of calamity is absolutely uncalled for.

Kepada mereka yang membuat ulasan dalam Bahasa Malaysia dengan cuba mempertahankan lukisan Zoy sebagai nukilan beliau untuk menggambarkan kekuasaan Sang Pencipta, saya katakan begini:

Minda saya simpel, seperti juga minda anak-anak yang menjadi penonton utama siri Ultraman di televisyen. Lukisan anda juga simpel dan ia mengundang sifat semulajadi golongan ini: Ketawa! Kenapa? Kerana pada dasarnya tujuan siri TV ini adalah untuk hiburan.

Victims of tsunami do not need to become your source of "hiburan".

There are a lot of people bashing Malaysian in other oversea forum as well as other International news portal, CNN. To these people, I say that our hearts are with the victims and their families. We certainly do not subscribe to the idea of Berita Harian (whatever they mean by the publication).

By the way, there are two definitions for "Out of his mind" by Cambridge Dictionary:

i) unable to behave or deal with things normally because something has made you very worried, unhappy or angry, and

ii) extremely stupid or mentally ill

come on, take your pick!
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Samsung Galaxy Ace

Don't mistake the Galaxy Ace for the Galaxy-S as they are pronounced almost similar.

Fiddled briefly with the Galaxy Ace few days ago at Karamunsing Complex and it feels easy on the palm. Size almost as big as the iPhone 3GS but first impression is that the build quality is miles behind the iPhone. If the iPhone's response to the finger flick is like breeze and fast, expect a slower response from this. Of course I should not compare the two as the price and target market are different. Alright, I'm just looking for a simple phone that is decent but not flashy.

This is the latest release and is priced much cheaper. Retailed at RM999.00 but street price could be lower and from my initial survey this week, one can get it for RM980.00 (Release date: Feb 2011).

By comparison, Galaxy-S is retailed at RM2,599 and could be had at RM1900-RM2000 depending on memory size. (Release date Mar 2010). There's already an updated version, Galaxy-S2 coming up and this, I think, should give iPhone 4 a run for the money.

Hope to get hold of one Galaxy Ace next week and come back to give feedback to this posting.

Feedback/Update:

I am using this as a second handset and it is not delivering what's expected - ease of browsing the internet, connecting to WiFi, one-hand typing. It is slow.

After using it for the past 1 year, it seem to have slowed down so much that you basically have to wait for quite a while for it to respond to each click (touch) of a button.

de engineur, June 2012