Chinese New Year is here (Feb 7)!!! Many Chinese travel back to their home village for these celebrations. The boys and I went out yesterday (Feb 7) and found many of the stores closed. Tonight (Feb 8) even more restaurants and stores are closed. In the areas we have been, it feels deserted ... which is a strange feeling here!!
We will bid farewell to the Year of the Fire Boar and welcome the Year of the Earth Rat on Feb 7, 2008.
Astrologers historically devised the lunar calendar around 300BC, during the rule of Emperor Yao, for farmers to know when to plant crops and harvest them. Based on the phases of the moon, the Chinese New Year occurs between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, usually during mid-January to mid-February of the Gregorian calendar.
According to legend, a monster threatening the Yellow River civilization disliked noise, light and the color red. The beast fled when lion dancers performed to the beat of drums, gongs and when the village homes were lit brightly and with many objects painted red.
May the Year of the Rat bring you and yours peace, health and wealth.
Aztech PC-Less Skype DECT - V500DS-S1
Good thing is that you do not have to have a PC running in order to pick up Skype calls. I picket it up at Harvey Norman (here in KL) for less than RM 400 (~800 SEK). It has the phone capabilities that Skype has, but no chat and video conferencing -- you can't get everything. This is the cheapest cordless phone that I have come across. Compare it with the Philips at Skype shop for example.
I have used Google Earth to find things here in Kuala Lumpur since we arrived here.
The place where I live Mont Kiara Aman looks like a building site, but these houses (twin towers) have been here at least 2 years now! Please notice that the copyright on the picture below said 2008.
Google it is time to update your (background) maps!!!
This is what I usually ask my boys when they get home. The question reminds me of this song. This version is performed by Eddie Skoller.
Andrew has been playing this song lately (and singing). It is not anything new but it still holds.
Last week Christine (see earlier blog entry) and I took the kids to the playground behind KLCC. It is a large and very nice playground, BUT we got there noon and the heat and Sunshine was terrible. I think we lasted for about 15-20 minutes not more. I kept singing the old tune "Mad dogs and Englishmen" which Christine never had heard before.
Ann got back during the weekend and told me that some parts of Sweden only had 12 hours of Sunshine during the month of December. We have not had a temperature below 20 C (probably 25 C) since we got here. Here people use the umbrellas for shielding themselves from the Sun. In Sweden people try to get a tan as fast as possible when they get a glimpse of the Sun. "God moves in mysterious ways".
Anyway here is Noël Coward from 1955.
If you have problems hearing what Mr. Coward is singing -- here are the lyrics.
If you arrive from Sweden to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia you are in for are slow ride. Sweden is one of the countries in the world with the best Internet connections.
We have bought a 1Mbit connection from TMNET - Streamyx and most of the time it works fine... But sometimes without no reason it does not work at ALL!! My main problem as an expat here in KL is that most of the information I would like to get access to is in Sweden, US-West or UK. Sometime the connection "times out" because it takes to long to get an answer (see ping below).
When you have problems with your connection ..... I found information on the web that suggests that you should turn your ADSL modem off for ~10 minutes so that the equipment can reset itself at the telephone exchange. Then start the ADSL modem and wait for 1-2 minutes before starting routers/switches and PCs.
If there is thunder and lightning in the air then your Internet connection might go down (might be that they close down the equipment so that it does not get hurt).
I have tried to find tools so that I can find out the speed of the Internet Connection that we have. I started out with the old Swedish developed test program TPtest from Konsumentverket that works fine except that it only connects to Swedish Servers and that it has not been updated for some time. However they have made a new test Bredbandskollen TPTEST which is easier except that it only connects to Swedish Servers and that it is in Swedish only (--Sorry).
After hunting around on the Internet I found Speedtest.net which has a number of servers all around the world to test with and the numbers look reasonable.
The values could be better but these are good values!! These tests below were made before 9 am local time (not too many people on the Internet in KL).
Here are some values from my PC to different parts of the world.
Paris is a nice a beautiful city and it is also the host for WoW (World of WarCraft) one of the Online Games that Andrew plays. One can understand why Andrew has problems with "Lags". If you look at the "Ping" field in the results you will see that it is 820 ms or 0.8 seconds for a packet to go from KL to Paris and back to KL. No wonder that Andrews avatars can not see what is coming and they get killed before they can do anything.
Speed of light = 299,792.458 kilometers per second.
Distance to server = ~10400 kilometers
velocity=distance/time => time=distance/velocity
The time to Paris traveling at the speed of light is 0.0347 seconds or 34.7 milliseconds. This is the best that physics can give us. Our test above takes 817 ms back and forth or 408 milliseconds one way.
Sorry Andrew your lag is about 10 times that of the Speed of light!!
My Summery
Here are my coordinates. Push the image and you will find out your place on the Internet.
If you have found a better test or have come to another conclusion I would be interested in your views. :-)
Ann and I wondered How a Rice Cooker Works!! How does it know when to turn off?? I guess we could have dismantled it but we are satisfied with our working one.
Today we went to KLCC to see and listen to Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra playing music from Space Movies and TV series (StarWars, Star Trek, ET and other). Great Fun!!!
Recently I bought a D-Link DNS-323. It is a diskless server .... well you have to buy the disks you like. I haven't had time to play around with it, but I will.
"Mommy, Why is There a Server in the House?", my kids would ask me that question not their Mother!!! The kids might ask "Mommy, Why has Daddy a New Server in the House (he got at least four already)?"
