links: May 2009 Archives

Water main bursts in Wanchai Staff reporter 1:41pm, May 22, 2009 Email to friend | Print a copy All lanes at Harbour Road, Central, near Fleming Road, were closed to traffic after a water main there burst, a spokesman for the Transport Department said on Friday. "About 4.30am, the water main burst," said the spokesman, adding that the main was about 450 millimetres in diameter. He said workers from the Water Supplies Department were still repairing it. "As they have been affected by the main bursting, all premises at Wan Chai and Happy Valley have had their sea water supplies suspended," he added. The spokesman said motorists going from Causeway Bay to Admiralty should use Tonnochy Road and Convention Avenue. "Those who drive from Admiralty to Causeway Bay should use Tim Mei Avenue and Lung Wui Road," he advised. (dave: disagreement between the headline and the first line of the story? Come on SCMP, pay some attention to detail.)

Madam, – Just to be clear (as the Government seems to be in collective denial), the reason Fianna Fáil is doing badly in the polls and will do badly on June 5th is not because they are making “the hard decisions for economic recovery” but because they brought the country to the brink of economic oblivion. – Yours, etc,

Why do so many people support software piracy? The answer is because pirated software is very cheap. I have a creative method to reduce software piracy - software companies can give some useful things to customers free, such as rice and shopping coupons. This will attract many people to buy software from their companies instead of buying things from pirate merchants. (dave: the real cure for software piracy is to encourage more use of open source software.)

“Multitasking is a myth,” Ms. Gallagher said. “You cannot do two things at once. The mechanism of attention is selection: it’s either this or it’s that.” She points to calculations that the typical person’s brain can process 173 billion bits of information over the course of a lifetime.

This is a really beautiful example of a long exposure combined with a flash to fill in some foreground. I'm guessing about 30 secs+ for the sky (no star trails, so not more than a few minutes), and just a quick pop with a speedlight to light up the logs. http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ (update: 44 seconds, according to the exif data.)