Weaned from paper diaries Saw these NUS diaries at the Raffles Museum the other day and realised I’m finally weaned from these, thanks to Google Calendar. GCal is my homepage to keep me alert about viewing and making appointments. Each appointment is also SMS’ed to my handphone (its free) and includes the location and notes. This is particularly helpful when stumbling about some strange venue and an SMS arrives with the proper address and relevant handphone numbers! Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch! I share my calendar with my honours students so they are able to schedule meetings and field trips with me. Looks like I am scheduled for two this week, in between marking, argh! Maybe paper was better after all. Basking in the sun Monitor lizard up a coconut tree on Pulau Ubin this morning, with the LSM2251 Ecollogy and the Environment class. See and download the full gallery on posterous Animal Diversity Pasar Malam Yesterday’s animal diversity “pasar malam” – LSM1103 Biodiversity students visit a station every 20 minutes, for a “show and tell” of animal groups conducted by the TAs and myself. Beach balled into using Pages Thanks to Word for beach-balling me into using Pages – sometimes you just have to be forced into switching to a non-familiar app. When preparing exam questions, I tend to use the old templates in Word to assemble the new document and I persist through the pauses incurred by the beachball to finish the job and move on. Last night, after three bouts of Word going into a stupor, I finally got out and into Pages; after a mild struggle I found it did the job well. So now I will to introduce it to a friend writing his thesis – might prevent grief later. Exhausted cat can’t keep up Poor Mr Bats, can’t keep up with my long hours of lesson preparation. This was another marathon for LSM1103 Biodiversity, a first year course in which we introduce some of the animal groups to the class. In this particular lecture, five phyla are discussed and Mr Bats slumped over the student's text book, Solomon et al. apparently in recognition of the futility of the task. In my time mollusca took two lectures. Mr Bats did the same last year, on an opened book and the class got to see the 2008 photo too. Wasn't caught on the webcast thankfully as this all happens in the first few minutes when the last 10% of the class are streaming in. I'd have expected these cats to do a better job of night vigils. The honours students this year appear to be wider awake in the dead of the night than these cats, hmph! See and download the full gallery on posterous SMRT Bloodmobile Drive | 22 Oct @ Rafles Place MRT Options when Microsoft Word crawls When I open Microsoft Word, life slows down to a crawl on my Mac. Mostly Word is really painful to use and the many significant pauses it subjects you to are capable of driving a calm person berserk. Apple’s S$138 iWork package includes Pages, a native word processing application which speeds along in comparison. For my simple, unformatted needs though, I prefer using TextWrangler, a free text editor which I already use to write and edit webpages directly on servers. Text editors, of course, fly at the speed of light. All Mac users already own TextEdit, a resident application of OS X. TextEdit can switch to an RTF option to allow for mild formatting needs and pdf generation is always a print option away in the Mac OS. Another of such applications is Bean, which I forgot about for awhile. It caught my eye once again and I am giving it another spin. Bean also reads docx files. Google Docs (formerly Writely) is an excellent alternative, especially if you are on a stable internet connection. It is a boon for collaborative work (e.g. this Web 2.0 outline) and for working across multiple computers or opportunistically typing into an existing document when you find yourself stuck somewhere with a terminal and some spare time. The limitation of all these, of course, is the need for document sharing with some Word user with a heavily formatted document or when tracking is necessary (it mostly isn’t). Then it’s time to fire up Microsoft Word again and force myself into a Zen state to deal with that inevitable beach ball. Struttin’ along the beach I love watching white-vented mynas forage along the beach, just above the tide line. This bird ventured forth after the first year’s left Changi beach at the end of their LSM1103 practical. Batch file renaming recommendation I have been using Graphic Converter for batch file renaming of my pictures. Mook Sum recommended this free batch file renamer during our meetup today. I am going to try this during the International Coastal Cleanup Singapore next year when Site Captains come to Lab 7 with photos from their various sites – they can now do the renaming themselves before handing the files to me; what a relief! World’s deepest bin – tools to combat improper disposal of litter Encouraging proper disposal of litter by http://thefuntheory.com See also Piano Stairs (thanks Peck Wai) athttp://thefuntheory.com Blood donation No. 99 and counting My dad was a regular blood donor inspiring me to want to start donating as soon as I was old enough. When I accompanied him on a visit or two, the biological logic and the names on the wall sealed my fate as a future regular blood donor! When I turned 18 though, I was enlisted in the army and in a state of complete exhaustion most of weekends. So it was only in July or August 1985 that I remember some JC classmates waiting patiently all morning while I finally got to head down to SGH to donate blood. These days, donation sessions are much less dramatic for me. I visit the very comfortable National Blood Centre as scheduled in my Google Calendar, provided teaching, supervision or illness doesn’t interfere! Apparently I have lovely blood vessels and was earmarked for plateletpheresis in the 90’s. But the nurses regretfully stopped my second platelet donation after the blood work came back indicating my count was too low. So I was switched back to plasma donation while I still frequented malaria hotspots in the region (see when not to donate) – this was in addition to a 6-week wait, in case my red blood cells harboured some malaria parasite that did not express itself! When I stopped traveling, I was returned to whole blood donation. Visiting the blood centre was fun since my quarterly visits over two decades meant I knew many of the nurses and saw them more regularly than some friends. We would catch up while I donated as I was often there during low traffic weekdays. They would pump me about my recent adventures and sometimes even remember where we left off to ask for updates! I see them less often these days, though as they are often deployed elsewhere. Pink bandage after donation – nurses tried to look for another colour but I said, never mind, and lo and behold, it had purple hearts! Though the years it has been interesting to see a variety of equipment, operational and nursing procedures improve. Some procedures were abandoned after a short experimental period which was good to see. They now also include a flyer to donors to explain, amongst other things, that families of patients requiring blood for operations are NOT REQUIRED TO PROVIDE REPLACEMENT BLOOD. In the early days, I used to experiment with blood flow timings variance with several parameters but given my mass, whole blood donation is inconsequential and happens too fast (3-4 mins) for me to register. Still, I have to up to my data junkie fetish and I keep count of my donations here: http://blood.sivasothi.com/ The count is far from complete but every now and then I find an old donor card and can add some dates. Besides keeping count, the page is almost a diary of interactions as it lists blog and web posts and links by others who have promoted blood donation – I remember the energetic NTU Red Cross volunteer who brought the donation drive to Orchard Road (Vibrant Blood A), some sweet-16 RGS students who initiated a drive in 2006 (via their teacher, my Biology Refugia kaki, Lim Cheng Puay) and a bunch of programmers from I2R who started up Donorweb. All these promotions have been necessary to maintain a collection at least 350 units a day. This need will increase as the population in Singapore ages. In 2004, the Singapore Red Cross who took over outreach noticed that “only 0.5% of our youth are blood donors”. So they worked to increase the number of youth and young adults donors and I do see a lot more large-scale donor drives and programmes promoted in blogs and facebook groups. I do hope it works out – the hope was that some proportion of those exposed to the need and procedure will go on to become regular donors, donating blood 2-4 times a year, rain or shine. Mercy Relief response to Ketsana, the South Pacific Tropical Storm (Cat 1), in the Philippines See Mercy Relief responds to South Pacific Tropical Storm in the Philippines “The Philippines government has declared a state of calamity and has made an appeal for international aid. Mercy Relief has obtained its fundraising permit from the Commissioner of Charities and will be collecting donations for the victims of the ‘South Pacific Tropical Storm’ in the Philippines from the 29 Sep-18 Oct 2009.” [They are sending a relief team over.] “From the 1st of October, the public can donate via a phone call to Tele-Mercy 1900 112 1010 (for a $10 donation) 1900 112 1050 (for a $50 donation) ” Where the tremors were felt – the Southern Sumatran earthquake Yesterday evening’s quake in South-central Sumatra (45 km WNW of Padang, Sumatra, Indonesia) is listed as Magnitude 7.6. and as having occurred on 30 Sep 2009 at 10:16:09 UTC (SST 06:16:09 PM). In comparison, the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami was unleashed by a 9.3 magnitude jolt along the same fault line [BBC]. The USGS Earthquake Hazards Program collects data about the intensity of each quake from the ground which is submitted by the public. This is compiled for the USGS Community Internet Intensity Map, a form of ground-truthing. Safe from the earthquake, Singapore still experienced tremors and 300 people submitted Type III intensity (weak shaking, no damage) records. Extensive damage is reported in Padang with thousands trapped under rubble and a death toll expected to exceed a thousand [CNA]. “Professor Kerry Sieh, professor of Geology, Earth Observatory of Singapore, NTU, said: “It’s definitely getting worse. The earthquake sequence began in 2000 with a 7.9 about 800 km away from the south of Singapore. You haven’t felt this big of a sequence of earthquakes that is many large earthquakes for at least 175 years.”" Abuzz about “Singapore: A Biography” Two days ago, I saw a notice about an upcoming book, “Singapore: A Biography” on the Singapore Heritage mailing list. “Wow, wow, wow,” I said to myself in the quiet of the night. “I have to get my hands on a copy!” Silently I applauded the second author whom I knew of and toiled on into yet another sleepless night. Just after midnight yesterday, the news had reached Buffalo, NY, with Kevin exploding “AWESOME!” – he was Retwittering @skinnylatte:’s comment that “Yu-Mei spent the last 2 years researching her “Singapore: A Biography” book”. Hours later he was telling @joonian that he “hopes to attend Yu-Mei’s “Singapore: A Biography” book talk … seems like a seminal piece of work every Singaporean should own. “ Kevin also alerted the Friends of Yesterday.sg mailing list and amidst the chatter that followed, Shaun facebooked an alert and echo-ed out sentiments in saying that the “extracts show that it will shape up to be a bloody good read and I’m personally loving the Sgt Pepper-ish cover montage.” The “Fortress of Testicular Solitude” now sports a ringing endorsement to the book: We are neglecting the second author of course so let me hasten to say, “kudos to him too!” I forwarded the Singapore Heritage post to the Pasir Panjang Heritage Guides as we have, at times, found vivid comments almost embarrassedly tucked away in footnotes of academic tomes. Many a story have thus fallen by the wayside and are waiting to be dug up by eager hands. Here these two fill a book and cite their sources – the arsenal of many an embattled history teacher has just improved. Let’s hope some will find this useful in confidently blowing life into the many dusty characters in the age-old narrative. So we eagerly await this *drum roll* – click the image for excerpts of the book at their website: The authors of Singapore: A Biography are Mark Ravinder Frost & Yu-Mei Balasingamchow. The publishers are National Museum of Singapore, Editions Didier Millet & Hong Kong University Press. The book hits the streets in mid-October 2009. They will discuss their book during these events: 18 Oct 2009, 2pm, National Library: “History as literature: the writing of Singapore: A Biography” – register. 20 Oct 2009, 7.30pm, Polymath & Crust: “Singapore: A Biography – a reading & discussion.” 24 Oct 2009, 2pm, National Museum of Singapore: “Heroes, villains and ordinary citizens: a short history of Singaporean dissent” – register. 31 Oct 2009, 11am, Singapore Writers Festival, at The Arts House: “Finding the Singapore Story.” RMBR Nature Guides Recruitment – register by 1st October 2009 An opportunity to volunteer for nature guiding with the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research. See Ron Yeo’s message: —beg— RMBR Nature Guides Recruitment Have you been wanting to volunteer for nature but don’t know where to begin? Sign up to be an RMBR Nature Guide! As an RMBR Nature Guide, you will be required to help guide visitors during our various public intertidal walks. Commitment Please ensure that you are able to commit to guide at least 4 times a year before you sign up. Our walks are usually conducted on weekends or public holidays. Training will be provided, covering mostly the guiding techniques, and so do be prepared to read up on your own to improve you knowledge on our intertidal areas and their organisms. At the end of the training, guides will be required to write a guiding script and go for on-the-job training. Please also ensure that you are able to attend the training below before you sign up: 24 Oct, Sat: 0900-1100hrs – Semakau Background and Common Session on Classification 1130-1330hrs – Ecosystems of Semakau, SOP, Guiding Technique & Script Writing 31 Oct, Sat: 1400-1600hrs – Guiding Practical Interview process Note that we will be interviewing all applicants to understand what are their expectations, and also to ensure that that they understand what is required to be a guide. If you are 15 years old and above, and are keen to become a nature guide after reading the above, please send the following details to ronyeo@gmail.com by 1 Oct 2009: Full name NRIC or passport number gender nationality date of birth mobile number home number occupation email address name and contact of next of kin (for emergency contact) Imagine that you are a guide, and you are tasked to explain to your participants about these 3 organisms: sand-sifting sea star, nudibranch and seagrass. Write a short para on each of these organism as if you are talking to the participants. After we receive your application, we will contact you to fix a date and time to meet up for a little chat. — end — CNET TechTracker Mac Public Beta CNET TechTracker can check your software and alert you about updates. Useful when you decide to conduct a maintenance session. You need a CNET userid, which I already had, to download and install the software. There is a Windows version. I apear to need 18 updates. While I usually wait until the next time I use an app to allow its auto-update to start teh download, it can get in the way if I am at an event, teaching someone or if a bright idea strikes me about inserting something during the 5-minute break in the middle of a lecture. Its nice if software simply behaves then! SuperDuper’s new “Backup on Connect” feature When I last blogged about ShirtPocket’s SuperDuper which I have been using for a few years now, I said, “My MacBook Pro (MBP) is backed up daily with SuperDuper! The schedule copies over only new files since the last backup [smart update]. SuperDuper! makes the backup drive bootable. Thus if the MBP’s hardisk crashes, I just need to link the backup drive by firewire, bootup and carry on.” The recent Snow Leopard compatible version of SuperDuper (v 2.6) adds a lovely option – “Backup on Connect”. This means the moment I plug in my backup drive, SuperDuper launches and starts SmartUpdat-ing automatically. And it will “Eject after Copy” so the hard disk is unmounted upon completion; lovely! Reducing pdf size Once a lecture presentation is prepared, I export my Keynote to a pdf file which I send to students. This file would be too large to share, so down-sizing pdfs is necessary. In the process, it is important for quality of images in the pdf not to become pixellated. Last year, I experimented with settings and eventually customised a profile in OS X’s ColorSync Utility. However, I changed my hard disk and clean-installed Leopard OS X so these settings were gone. Instead of looking for the settings in my backup hard disk, I googled in case I’d fine something new and I found Jerome Colas’ bunch of filters that do the job on the Apple Discussions forum: It is a much better method as the options are integrated in every print window. I have been using his “150 dpi average quality” filter all semester. When I peeked at a student’s printed notes in the marine biology class, they looked great. Thanks Jerome! Pedal Ubin ends but Pulau Ubin explorations continue I am editing the Pedal Ubin webpage for what must be the final time. This current version of a 12-year exploratory cycling programme on Pualu Ubin has come to an end. The current guides are veterans of the 2nd and 3rd cohorts who were trained and assumed duties under the Pedal Ubin banner. Some have served since 2003 – six years! We had a simple farewell dinner earlier and chatted about regular things. One more in our company will head overseas but the rest hope to meet to cycle leisurely around the island wihtout the responsibility of participants but with the company of friends. So right now I set about amending the webpage to indicate closure of the programme. Next week though, I return to the island with teaching assistants for a recce trip in preparation for an upcoming field trip with the new second year undergraduate ecology course. The Pedal Ubin experience will play a significant role in the design, management and logistics of this field trip. So explorations of Pulau Ubin continue… Editing the webpage is done with TextWrangler Update – posted announcement on Habitatews – Pedal Ubin – ride’s over after 12 years! International Coastal Cleanup Singapore 2009 The results of data collection from today’s cleanup has been streaming in. Everyone has submitted data quickly and we have had it processed, verified and posted on the webpage’s results page. At the same time, photos have been uploaded to the Habitatnews photo collection on Flickr: Twitter has been useful in posting short news of data and photo updates, see twitter.com/coastalcleanup: And of course, there has been the blogging of our experiences – comments invited from the organisers have been sent to posterous and with a little editing, most of the posts have been going up almost as soon as they are in at the ICCS blog at coastalcleanup.wordpress.com/ And all of this is anchored at the the ICCS webpage at coastalcleanup.nus.edu.sg Monkey business Posted via email from otterman’s posterous Twittering science meetings – nature podcast Nature Podcast this weeks features science journalism – cheerleaders or watchdogs for science? How technology (twitter mainly) is changing conference reporting (they hazard more competition than anything) and how front page news is generated from science news. Link Meanwhile, you can follow Ed Yong on twitter who is attending the 6th World Conference of Science Journalists. For all participant tweets, see #wcsj. Using the Prolink WN2100 USB wireless adaptor I have had to get an external wireless adaptor for my 3-year old MacBook Pro (long story) and grabbed a S$69 Prolink WN2100 from the IT Co-op at YIH at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Mac OS X support is indicated on the box but no more mention is made of it thereafter, either there or on the Prolink support pages. That’s not unusual but after I plugged in the USB device into my MacBook Pro, nothing happened which WAS unusual. So I figured a driver that post-dated my OS was required and eventually sorted it out. During that process, I found no other user experience online so I’m posting this for the next macaddict hunting the net in a similar situation in future. I sent the Prolink support staff these instructions by email when I realised they were unfamiliar with macs. Hopefully this will be added to their FAQ pages. I am still on OS X 10.5.6 and am not sure if this would be needed in 10.5.7. But suffice to say, if you stick a Prolink WN2100 into your mac’s USB port and nothing happens, try this: Download the OS X drivers (10.3 – 10.5) from the relevant Prolink downloads page. Unzip, run the relevant installer and restart your mac as prompted. AFTER the restart, plug the WN2100 in to your USB port — the “USB Wireless Utility” window will appear (note: if the WN2100 unit is already plugged in, the utility window will not appear, leaving you as stumped as I was, briefly. In the “Site Survey” tab, locate your network, select it and click “Connect” at the bottom of the window. You will be prompted to open the System Preferences> Network window, where you will see a “USB Ethernet (en3)” service now listed (you can rename this). The network configuration should have been automatically inserted, so just click “Apply” at the bottom right and close the window. Ben stabbed by a mangrove whipray Ben Godsall, visiting PhD student to my lab (Systematics & Ecology Lab, NUS) gets stabbed by a mangrove whipray while helping to catch tree-climbing crabs in the Sungei Buloh mangrove. With Paul, we three were accompanying Joanne (the crab team) on her hunt to catch just a couple of adult female Episesarma versicolor crabs for the larval project. Since there were enough of them mucking about in the water, I took photos from the boardwalk. At this point, I was training the camera on Ben from the boardwalk for what film folk call the “hero shot”, so that he could use it to good measure back home. So it was opportune that at that point, he got stabbed – oh well, you know what I mean! His reaction was so similar to mine from way back in 2005/6 that I realised it had to be the same culprit. His observations confirmed it and the video is priceless. He should be okay but there will be quit a bit of a pain that will linger. At least he knows what it is. Besides Ben’s reasonably dignified response, watch the video closely and you’ll see the ray flapping about! This is the culprit species, the Mangrove whipray (Himantura walga). This photo below was taken at Sungei Buloh Wetlands Reserve in January. For a good look at the animal and its spines, you should look at some of the lovely photos on Ria’s WildSingapore. Ben’s injury – plenty of hurt for such a small spot!I wonder if he will discover it is a double puncture later, like I did. Ben was injured in the same part of his foot as I was in 2006 (or 2005) – on the inside, forward of the ankle. It turns out that Luan Keng escaped a similar fate last month (see Kok Sheng’s blog post). The spine was embeded close to where Ben and I received our injuries, giving you an idea of the typical scenario when a roving foot encounters a whipray which backs into it. You can imagine some unfortunate predator getting the worst of this business end! So Alvin proposed zoology purple hearts be awarded to Ben, Chay Hoon, Ria and myself. But I think Luan Keng will be the happiest! Crab team on a high tide trip Joanne is one of our honours students studying the larvae of tree-climbing crabs in Singapore mangroves. Today we went out to catch a couple of Episesarma versicolor crabs at Sungei Buloh Wetlands Reserve. The moon was full recently, so some of the females would still be gravid and she can study the larvae in the lab as they hatch out.  It was nice seeing Joanne, Paul (who did a Perisesarma sp. study last year) and Ben (who is doing a Selatium brocki study now) get a feel of Episesarma after clocking some night work with Selatium brocki. Episesarma is a different kettle of fish altogether it was interesting for them to figure the species behaviour out and respond to it. Posted via email from otterman’s posterous Lesser Coucal on the railing, drying its wings We were on our way out of Sungei Buloh Wetlands Reserve when we saw a lesser coucal (Centropus begalensis) drying its wings after a rain. It had emerged from the grasslands in the adjacent property to the railings after the afternoon showers, as it is wont to do. We watched from the car as it shook itself dry and stretched and preened its wings. I have loved watching coucals since I first spotted them in the department's garden two decades ago, when they used to emerge in the evening to hunt the changeable lizard where Block S1A now stands.  This was about the first shot I grabbed through the car window. For some reason, there was a hazy sheen that stretched across the Straits of Johor at 2pm. So the early afternoon had instead an early morning ambience. This sure was a lovely reward for the morning's SPROUTS workshop @ Sungei Buloh Wetlands Reserve. Posted via email from otterman’s posterous Changi Tree sculptures at zoo entrance Was by the zoo and spotted a couple of Changi Tree (Hopea sangal) sculptures. They have relocated at least two pieces to the entrance. I will inspect them and the other pieces the next time I am there which appears to be more often these days.  These sculptures are from sections of the tree that was felled on 20th November 2002. The series of events led to its discovery prior to that, the fruiting, tragic felling, court case, sculpture symposium, adoption by the zoo, commemoration in sculpture and preservation of slices for two museums, and the replanting of its saplings is listed on the Changi Heritage webpage. I was then part of an energetic and dedicated working group that saw to the public interest of the felled tree. It was quite a priviledge. See and download the full gallery on posterous Posted via email from otterman’s posterous Scrawling on a glass-topped table II Last week I started taking meetings at the Raffles Museum while some students rummaged catalogued by library and discovered my stash of botany books. This scrawl below is from another meeting, with the prospective new Raffles Museum Toddycats manpower officer. The diagram explained how things were supposed to work. She’ll soon realise I’m the weak link since I shudder at thought of running training workshops once again for all the programmes, like I used to do years ago. Meanwhile, I will spend the bulk of Tuesday in that room, doing more scrawling with multiple meetings including a follow up on this one. Nora the cat, piano player Nora is a four-year old cat who began playing at age one and now strikes the piano several times a day. She now has merchandise and a book as well. Find out more at burnellyow's YouTube page See her famous video (13.6 million views now) below and its "better" sequel. I like how the sequel begins with her purring! Posted via email from otterman’s posterous His Royal Highness, Xylo the Cat Xylo is leaning on my blue Raffles Museum Toddycats polo t-shirt. He usually gets up on the bed as I prepare to leave the house and sit amongst my clothes, keeping me company while I get ready. In this shot he looked quite regal! Posted via email from otterman’s posterous