confusion

I assure you I was not on my way to Lagos. But during my 8 hour flight back to Singapore from Sydney the plane appears to have been stuck at 0 Longitude, 0 Latitude. But somehow I still got to Singapore.

Someone has produced an interactive map of all the geotagged tweets since 2011 [mapbox.com]… You can see how iPhone addicted Singapore is, while Malaysia and Indonesia are still dominated by Blackberry:

I suspect that today Singapore would be more balanced between iPhone and Android but a few years ago the penetration rate for iPhone was crazy here.

The view from my office today…

Compare the typical view…

Welcome to BeijingSingapore!

All of this is caused by fires in Indonesia, slash-and-burn farming to replenish the fields or create new fields. Indonesia claims that many of the fires are started on Palm Oil plantations that are owned by Singaporean or Malaysian companies but then refuses to name the companies. The diplomatic tit-for-tat is all getting quite childish.

You can see the fires:

A few minutes outside in this is enough to give you a crappy feeling in your stomach all day. The government publishes numbers of the Pollutant Standards Index (PSI) [wikipedia.org], but their site only shows today’s numbers [nea.gov.sg]. Wikipedia has the relevant historic numbers, it’s ugly this month:

This happened back in 2006 [wikipedia.org] and way back in ’97 [wikipedia.org].

To summarize; it’s fucking nasty outside… and actually dangerous.

OK, I’m a little late posting this… about 5 months but anyway, I got a Wicked Laser [wickedlasers.com]! From one of my sisters. For my birthday. Look at my laser…

This is my laser. There are many like it, but this one is mine. [wikipedia.org]

At this point it’s important to point out that lasers make everything better [splitreason.com]. Except Alderaan [cad-comic.com].

But then my older sister reminded me that I don’t have a very good history with lasers. AKA: The incident with the state cops.

Back in, like, 1997 I had me a laser pointer. Red, in the style of the day. And lasers are cool and must be pointed at everything. Everything. So one night while driving down the Interstate with M██████…

Aside: I realize there is no way to tell this story without sounding like we were complete and utter idiots. Now that I have that out of my system… Back to our regularly scheduled program.

While I was driving M██████ was pointing the laser at various things we passed, trees, the guard rail, etc. There was no one else around when we started. Then he pointed it at a road sign and the reflection was crazy. Road signs being highly reflective and all. After a few signs we noticed something cool; the laser didn’t reflect off of the green road signs, you could see it but it was just a faint red dot whereas it was more like a small red explosion on the other signs. So as we zoomed down the interstate at, something like, 65 mph M██████ was pointed the laser at road signs and especially the big green ones because as you moved the laser back and forth over the white lettering and green sign it produced a strobe like effect. But after a while it got boring. And that was that.

Till I got home two hours later.

And there was a state cop car in my parents driveway.

Turns out some woman driving in front of us saw the laser reflecting off the road signs and got scared that we had some sort of laser scoped gun sight… and accompanying gun. I can only assume that this woman watched a lot of action movies. So she slowed down and got my license plate number and called the cops. Didn’t take the cops very long to show up at my parents house.

I had to sit in the cop’s car and explain what we had done. Then ride down to M██████’s house with the cop to confirm the story and sit while the cop filled out a report, which we signed and then he lectured us for a while. I won’t even tell how much trouble we were both in with our parents after explaining ourselves to a state cop who had waited at my house for over an hour.

So my older sister is right; I don’t have a good record with lasers. But really? Can you blame me?

Do you like lasers?

Fuck yeah you do. [stackoverflow.com]