Indian festival of color

Earth Hour Video

There is no pot of gold at the end of any rainbow

^ That’s what I was talking about all these years.

Earth Hour message is lost in transit

So Earth Hour is over.

As a publicity campaign, it was a success. But from an educational perspective, it was a failure.

Many doesn’t even know what’s the whole hoo haa was except everyone will be turning off their lights. Some even blew out the candles they had. Seems like as long as the place is in pitch black darkness, it’s ok. But that alone shows that the message for energy consumption and renewal is lost.

I was looking at the KL skyline and all I see is glaring lights from all the residential areas and the shops down below. I suppose a little traffic jam was caused by motorist slowing down when they see the twin towers shutting down their lights.

So an hour is wasted and the electricity bill is slightly cheaper but come tomorrow, everyone else will be back to their usual habit.

Below’s the photos I took from the night.

^ Sebastian’s friend Soo Peng (I hope it’s the right spelling) joined us for the lights off ceremony. She ordered the Burj Al Arab thinking it’s some Roti Kamdar wannabe and out came this huge pizza. Took us 3 hours to finish it.

^ Sebastian’s mixed plate looks burnt *ponders how to eat*.

^ He decided to play with his food instead.

^ This is the KL skyline on that night. Seems like most buildings just say to hell with all that 8.30 to 9.30 crap and just left the lights off the whole evening. Not going to pay someone to switch them off and on again on a fancy.

^ KL tower went dark ahead of schedule in a Malaysia Boleh spirit and pissed on everyone looking for a synchronized light show. KLCC plays catch up in a left-right-zig-zag lights off.

^ My milspec night vision at work. Targeting, targeting… oops, no missiles tonight. KLCC is in the background. KL Tower is just a spec of dirt on the left.

^ Still no explosions, but KLCC is dark now.

^ Sebastian picked the wrong day to snap a postcard picture of KL skyline.

  ^ Sorry, no light show for you.

^ Some people can’t make it back in time, stuck in a traffic jam I presume is caused by someone switching off their headlights and rear ending the car in front.

^ Spent some time hunting for landmarks, here’s Spectrum in Ampang.

^ KLCC lights off, but for safety reasons you can still see the beacons. 

^ Candid of Sebastian’s moments. ;)

My own cloud storage

I keep hearing cloud computing being use all over the internet (if you don’t, you haven’t spent too much time online).

Seems like there’s cloud computing is being used to trade files the old school BT way, used for gaming or push game stream method (processor and graphics rendered offsite, output compressed as video and pushed to computer across the cloud) and even cloud processing (similar as before, computing power is shared across all in the cloud).

As such I tried to set up my little own Dark Net (private cloud) and link it across all my computers I have lying at home. I tried this software called Free Net some time ago but it was a hassle to setup and configure. So I jumped to this software called Groove (which was acquired by Microsoft in 2003) which has it’s own GUI and user friendly setup page.

PS: You need to get the Pre2003 Groove or else you will need to buy an Office Enterprise FPP package cause it’s sure aint included in your OEM. That or just *ahem* get it from your usual *channel*. Your choice.

Anyway I installed it on all my computers, created a standard workspace and dumped a couple of MP3’s to test it out. So far it works as I can see the files on all my computers. However when I tried to link my existing My Music folder to be synced Groove seems to be having some problem as only 6 our of 30 folders are synced. Bug?

PS: I’ve been attending a Microsoft training on licensing of Microsoft products and I’m just wondering, if music labels start charging song use like Microsoft did, I’d need a couple of Client Access License (CALs) and a server license to host my music across all these servers. =P