Ads for the Competitor

If you provide free service and get your revenue through advertising, would you allow your competitor to place an ad on your service? Apparently Google will:

Unbiased ads... that's Google living up to its slogan: "Don't be evil"!

A Haunting World Without Us

Alan Weisman's The World Without Us was on my reading list for a long time - quite high up in fact - but I've never got the chance until I visited the National Library last week (both the Sengkang and NUS library don't have it). Now that I've began on it, I realised what a haunting read it is.

For those who don't know, the book speculates on what would happen to the world, both urban and natural, if humans were to suddenly disappear right now. How would our houses disintegrate, how would our cities decay, what will happen to the pollution we generated, and what will be the fate of those empty farmlands, etc.. The is mostly done through interviews with certain experts, such as soil analysts and forest conservationists, but not unexpectedly with a environmental slant. It may not seem like it, but it is somewhat a reflection on the impact mankind are inflicting on the planet.

I know it ought not be taken too seriously. After all, it is pretty much speculative and not firmly grounded on good science. Weisman is, ultimately, a journalist and not a scientist, and this book is not even an analysis of the consensus of experts, so it will be foolish to accept this as if it is a scientific fact. But try as I may to question the speculation, I cannot deny the facts presented (unless Weisman lied outright, but then this book will be infamous rather than famous as it is). Most disturbing of what I've read so far is a chapter discussing the impact of plastics on the environment. It went way further than I thought worst possible.

This is certainly an ingenious method of conveying the way we are smashing our environment. A truly sombre book; one that really makes me think. When was the last time I've encountered such books...

SPCA Kittehs!

I've been helping out at the SPCA cat shelters for months now. Helping out around the cat cages, I've seen many cats (particularly cute kittens) come and go, but this week the arrivals are so special!

There're this pair of sisters (left: Skylar; right: Peaches) so stuffed with cuteness that I doubt I'll see them by the end of next week!

And the same goes for Casey, this rather uniquely coloured cat. Not only is the silver coat special, she's also extremely vocal, and vocal cats tend to get more attention and chances of getting adopted.

This is Misty, a round-faced chubby cat. She also has a warm temperament. Personally, if I were to choose one cat to adopt, she'd stand a high chance of topping the list!

And finally, this is Miracle. Here, she appeared like a typical local cat, but her name is apt if you look at the photo below:

That's right, her front right leg is missing. According to the SPCA adoption gallery, she arrived at SPCA in such a state. She really warmed my sympathy when I saw her, and it really made me wonder the possibly difficult life she must've lead previously. She is the primary reason for the "specialness" of this week's arrivals!

Oh, by the way, if you're a volunteer and have time to spare, do help out these days because there is somewhat a shortage of help at the moment (probably because of the school exams).

Five Years of Firefox

Being in the GMT+ time zones, sometimes you just have to celebrate events and anniversaries the day after it was suppose to happen because that's when the world starts trumpeting yesterday's events.

So here we have, a half-decade birthday of one of the open source community's proudest representation: Firefox.



Firefox has its impact in web browsing, partly because it's such an awesome program, and partly because it's ideas are so powerful, almost every web browser now has them. Things like tabbed browsing (I know FF is not the first to have it, but it's the first to implement it correctly popularise it), enhanced security and community-based add-ons. I still remember how much I was wowed by tabbed browsing, after having to wage a constant war against a gambolling mess of Internet Explorers windows.

I think I've switched to FF long before it was officially released five years ago, that is, the one with a version number less than unity. It was already so good then, though I had to bear with some occasional crashes. Honestly, I can't remember what I used previously... I think there was a time I used IE (it wasn't so bad then), as well as Netscape Navigator (but Netscape 6 sucks mega big time though... what's with the version 6 of browsers being so sucky?...)

Now the guys at Microsoft has emerged from their reverie and started moseying in the IE department, but I think it's a long catch up to do.

Romantic Pose

A photo I took in the cattery at SPCA some time ago:

Looks like some romance scene from a movie. Anyone wants to cheezburgerise it?