Coconut Split

I was in the Botanic Gardens today, and I came across this weird coconut tree:



This is quite a bizarre sight because, the way coconuts grow, I cannot imagine how such a branching out can occur naturally. My guess is that the botanists have grafted one coconut plant onto another (can you graft a coconut?), probably for scientific reasons.

Well now if pirates want to hide gold in the Botanic Gardens, that's an unmistakable landmark!

Time-Lapse Video of Drive along AYE/ECP

Just for fun, I created this time-lapse video using my digital camera while driving along AYE and ECP. I placed my camera on a small tripod on the dashboard, and recorded twenty minutes of nonstop travelling which ended when the tripod fell over while I circled up the Changi Village exit along ECP.



The video was sped up 25 times. And because of this modification of framerate, I was able to eliminate the slight choppiness of the recorded video (since my camera can only go up to about 11 fps). But I can do nothing about the quality: 640 by 480 is the max my good old camera can go.

Some music will be great, but it's too much a hassle to find a royalty-free music.

The Superfluous Checkbox

I had to access www.ns.sg today to apply for an Overseas Notification. It has been quite a while - a few months at least - since I've visited the website, and one improvement is noticeable: the download speed of the website. Previously, it can take minutes before a page - a normal page with a few small images - load, but it seems that they have finally migrated away from their antiquated server. I hope they can do the same to the signal sets we carry, but I digress...

Since I was logged in to that website, I thought I might as well update some of my particulars, mainly my email address. Apparently, www.ns.sg thinks I'm still using my Hotmail one, whereas it is nearly a year since I switched over to Gmail. I thought I had changed with www.ns.sg when I ditched Hotmail, but maybe I got tired of spending half an hour trying to access the profile page (which is creatively called MyProfile).

Well, I did just that, and tried to submit. It threw this back at me:



It seems that I need to tick a checkbox saying "I would like to receive NS Portal eNewsletter updates and agree to Terms and Conditions". And since I cannot submit my personal information without agreeing to the Terms and Conditions, this checkbox is superfluous. Die die I must subscribe to the newsletter I won't read, and probably filter to spam when they start coming.

Sigh... why so Pioneer magazine one? But at least this one no need to pay...

A New Way to Google

Try Bing: a whole new way to google what you want to find!