The image below is from a screenshot of my iPhone home-screen the other day when I was on a plane. Why does it show a burned in ghost image of an operator logo, time and alarm setting? Especially why did it choose to show a ghost image of an operator that is not my home operator and that I have not been on in over a month?

Weird.

Nir [flickr.com] and I went back to Sungai Buloh Wetlands Reserve last week (original photos here [confusion.cc]). Not many photos but you can click the link above to see all of mine. Last time we went we had a better mix of wildlife; frogs, crabs (lots of crabs) and some Monitor Lizards. This time it was lizards, lizards and more lizards. Though in the end we did manage a few shots of birds but they never got very close. And we saw a croc!

That’s what a 5.9 looks like for a hundred plus miles away. Guess the needle can’t go back and forth far enough.

The quake, which had it’s epicenter outside Mineral, Virginia, was close to where I grew up. How close? Lets see:

Kinda close. Like 15 miles close.

Well, everyone I know seems to be OK. My dad was at home, and apparently slept through the whole thing. How bad could it have been? I understand it was the strongest quake to hit Virginia in more than 100 years. But there have been at least two other noticeable quakes [confusion.cc] in my lifetime produced from about the same area. I got a concussion from one, but was far enough away in DC that I didn’t feel the second one. Then there was the sonic boom everyone thought was an earthquake when I was in college…

Building on our previous rant on data caps killing The Cloud [confusion.cc]; I do think there is an opportunity for service providers in The Cloud, but it’s not really about them offering anything new or exciting in terms of technology. It’s about utility. The thing that the service providers have that over-the-top (OTT) players, like Apple, Google and Microsoft, don’t have is how close they are to the consumer. For my data to get to Apple or Google or Microsoft it has to traverse the service providers network and then some backbone providers network before ending up in some Microsoft, Google or Apple data center half way around the world. On the other hand The Cloud operated by my service provider is just down the road (in internet terms). This is where the opportunity lies.

If I was a service provider I’d put together a cloud service that was designed around using that advantage. Rather than trying to be the be-all-end-all provider of the content itself — a nasty low margin business (which has sidetracked me before [confusion.cc] — I’d be the best cloud for the consumers. Since I’m close and own the network, transmission quality is within my control for streaming media. So I’d sell the customer a cloud service that allowed unlimited upload, download and streaming of any data they want; I don’t care where it came from. My cloud cost you a flat rate and you can do what you want with that data over my network. At the same time there is still a cap on your out-of-network data traffic, so using someone else’s cloud could cost you, and if you want to stream a lot of data it could cost you a lot. One more thing that is needed to make this work, at least for me, is a guarantee that I can take my media back out as easily as I can put it in, so there is not data lock-in only the typical commercial lock-in of a contract.

This is the cloud service I want – open (in terms of where I buy the content does not matter; unlimited upload/download and streaming, high speed and good quality. I would pay for that.

Another abandoned place in Singapore. This one is one of the best looking I’ve seen. It’s right smack in the middle of the multi-million dollar homes of Tanglin.

Apparently between the late 50′s and early 80′s the government of Brunei sent many of it’s students overseas to study as it did not have enough schools and teachers. The hostel on Tanglin Hill Rd was built to house these students. It’s been abandoned now since the early 80′s. It’s quite valuable land, I wonder how long it will last.

You can find out a bit more about the history of the Hostel at The Daily Brunei Resources [bruneiresources.blogspot.com].

Click the photo for the whole set on Flickr.