Here are a few pointers on this matter ...

Again and again we are asked to judge ourselves by the love we have for others:

In the MARCH 2004 edition, the EDITORIAL by Stanley Schmidt was entitled "ACHILLES' GRID" -- which referred to the vulnerability of over-dependence on the "power grid".

We are so used to "flick a switch" and get instant power -- to light up a place, to microwave a pizza, to aircon or heat up a room, etc....

And almost every aspect of our modern transport infrastructure, such as subways, elevators, traffic lights, street lights, and so forth depend on that electrical power.

In this EDITORIAL, Schimdt related how he was caught unprepared one late afternoon in the summer of 2003, in New York City (specifically the island-borough of Manhattan), when a power failure occurred while he was at Grand Central station waiting for the train to pull out.

(This particular power failure was reminiscent of the "infamous Blackouts of 1965 and 1977", in terms of severity and geographical extent, and with a local failure propagating -- and causing cascaded failures --throughout an overly-interconnected power grid.)

Even after reaching the main entrance on 42nd Street -- in the process, "traipsing through the mostly dark cavernous interior of Grand Central" -- things were not much better: Schimdt was still faced with the problem of getting home, where home was way out of Manhattan-NYC, "too far out to walk home; that would take days."

Meanwhile, the "considerable crowd" at the subway entrance on 42nd Street "grew rapidly" and "people were packed together like sardines all up and down both sides" of 42nd, "and spilling out into it, waiting for some official diagnosis and prognosis that never came".

Continued Schimdt: "No working lights could be seen anywhere along the street.... Many people were trying to make cell phone calls -- so many that only once in a great while did one of them get through.... Soon there were vague but fairly consistent reports that the entire eastern seaboard was affected, and some said the whole Northeast as far west as Ohio and north into Canada."

The outside temperature was about 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and several people "succumbed to heat and anxiety and needed emergency medical attention ... just about anywhere in the city. Some vehicular traffic still flowed, but not much, and more and more of it was emergency vehicles of all sorts going in all directions".

Soon, thirst became an issue, and Schimdt "tried the restaurant across the street, which has an open door" and was packed with "lots of people inside". But Schimdt was told by the bartender "they'd sold out of bottled water". He did managed to get some precious tap water from the bartender.

Then, evening began to become a reality, and Schimdt had already "been on the street a couple of hours, and spending the night there [on the street], with all the privileges and benefits that come with that, was beginning to look like a very real possibility."

Schimdt couldn't contact his Manhattan friends by cell phone. The buses "from the Port Authority terminal" weren't running. "That seemed to leave one alternative to sleeping on the street: find a taxi driver willing to make a lengthy run out of town, and pay him a princely sum".

Schimdt was lucky and did eventually managed to flag down an OFF DUTY taxi, whose driver understandably didn't want to get to where Schimdt wanted to go, but eventually the driver agreed, "after the specific promise of a very substantial tip and directions to and fro."

Not everyone was as lucky as Schimdt, and many New Yorkers weren't able to get home. Those who did get home experienced the reality of the size of all five boroughs of NYC [Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, The Bronx, and Staten Island]: "New York City is so big that it took some of them many hours and many miles of walking, much of it in the dark, to get there. And a great many people who work in New York City live dozens of miles away, a distance that simply can't be walked in one night. Hundreds of thousands, quite possibly millions, of them wound up sleeping on office or bus or train station floors, or right on the sidewalks."

This particular Blackout -- which took out the entire NYC, 80 per cent of NY State and "large portions of eight other states and provinces" -- compared to those that happened in 1965 and 1977, was "by at least some measures ... the worst. From one point of view, three times in almost forty years doesn't sound like a lot. From another, the fact that we're still making the same kind of massively disruptive mistake after that long doesn't speak well for our cultural learning curve."

Cautioned Schimdt: "The important lessons I see in this are: (1) The danger of depending on technological infrastructures so huge and interconnected that a relatively small local fault can cause such massive inconvenience over such a wide area; and (2) The extreme vulnerability that is incurred by packing such high densities of people and businesses into such large concentrations as New York City. ... As the latest big blackout reminds us, when we lose the power grid, we lose almost everything else that we think of as basic parts of everyday life...."

"And, of course, while the power grid is the most basic large-scale infrastructure on which we let ourselves depend, it's rapidly being joined by others. Probably the second most important is already the internet and the vast number of documents and databases connected to it. Incidents like this summer's blackout, crippling both the power grid and the internet, are good reminders that the 'paperless society' people used to dream of is really a bad idea; and even though some now joke about how far from achieving it we still are, we're probably too close for our own good. Digital media have tremendous advantages over hardcopy -- when they're working. But when they become unusable, without hard copies you have nothing...."

"So -- letting too much of our lives depend on a huge, complex infrastructure that can be brought crashing down in nine seconds by a local failure in some part of it makes us vulnerable in a very big way. So does cramming vast numbers of us into places like Manhattan (or, on a smaller scale, many other urban areas). Manhattan is small enough that when you put millions of people into it, the number per square mile is very large -- and so is the amount of supplies and services needed to support and clean up after them. Yet it's so large -- especially when you consider the huge amount of additional urbanization in the surrounding boroughs [i.e., Queens, Brooklyn, The Bronx, and Staten Island] and New Jersey suburbs -- that it's a major undertaking to get them out when they want or need to leave. In a smaller urban area, most commuters can walk home in a few hours if they need to. In New York, millions of suburban commuters can't. So when something like the big blackout happens, you have way too many people in way too small a space, and no practical way to get them out. So they're stuck there, and if it goes on long, conditions go downhill fast."

Close to the start of this year (2005), I spoke to a New Yorker about how the 911 tragedy affected his getting home, and he told me that he walked home to Brooklyn but didn't reach his home till 2 a.m. in the morning. Here in the red-dot, miniscule Singapore, walking home may not take you as long as half a day or three-quarters of a day, but the vulnerability of our power system was also brought home to us in recent blackouts in some parts of the island.

The problem may not be as intractable as in NYC, but it is nevertheless a daunting problem even in tiny Singapore ... think about this: what alternative power source does the average Singaporean household has? Backup power generator? Solar power? Batteries? Kerosene lamps?

And in an extended period of failure of the power grid, how would you cook your food -- never mind how you would generate light?

A long period of power failure may affect even other infrastructures that may not at first glance appear to be connected to the power grid -- such as our water supply system, which needs electricity for pumping the water, even for producing Newater and desalinated water, and definitely for all the activities of the entire filtration and treatment process.

Will bottled water and related water-based beverages (e.g., canned and bottled "soda", as the Americans call it; canned and bottled fruit juices, and so forth) last us if a blackout becomes serious enough?

Think about it: how well-prepared are you, really?

That is, I'd let my hair grow for the last six months or so.

Had I remain in Scotland (was there with my wife and son, some fifteen years earlier -- that is, back in the early Nineties), then I would have continued to let my hair grow even longer still, right down to my shoulders ... the weather was that nice to wear long hair. But it is simply too uncomfortable to keep long hair in hot and humid Singapore -- although long hair works well at the workplace where the aircon can get real cold!

Of course, being able to keep long hair is a sort of testament to FREEDOM -- no longer do I find myself being told to cut my hair short, either by my parents, school teachers, work colleagues, relatives, the stupid government, etc., etc.

You may be too young to remember -- or you may not have been born yet -- about the Sixties and Seventies, when long hair was OFFICIALLY frowned upon in Singapore ... Hey, even the National Library put up posters that said that those with long hair will be "served last".

I mean, how stupid can things get?

After decades of stringent controls and enforcement over the citizenry -- right even into something as personal as hair length ... and today, in the early years of the 21st Century, we have woken up to the fact that we are not that creative and innovative ...

Hey, even CREATIVE TECHNOLOGY was turned down from listing in the second board in Singapore (SESDAQ) -- so our intrepid CEO from CREATIVE, MR SIM WONG HOO, went over to the USA to list CREATIVE LABS in their second board, NASDAQ.

And, after the NASDAQ listing by CREATIVE LABS ... the rest, as they say, is (multimedia) history! That is, without the development of PC sound systems such as CREATIVE TECHNOLOGY's Sound Blaster Cards to replace the tepid PC speaker, it is doubtful that subsequent PC developments into CD-ROM/CD-R, CD-RW, DVD, gaming, mp3, mpeg, Shockwave, Java, etc., would have got anywhere as fast as they did.

What a tragi-comedy!

After the CREATIVE TECHNOLOGY's being-turned-down-from-listing-in-Singapore's-SESDAQ debacle, the SESDAQ was successful in convincing another local Singapore "multimedia/computer" company, AZTECH MULTIMEDIA, to list in SESDAQ first, when that company wanted to follow CREATIVE TECHNOLOGY's brave footsteps in listing in NASDAQ instead of in SESDAQ. Perhaps, AZTECH didn't want to be turned down by SESDAQ, the way CREATIVE TECHNOLOGY was. (AZTECH was the company that brought out the GALAXY Sound Cards to compete with CREATIVE TECHNOLOGY's Sound Blaster Cards, back in the Days of Computer Antiquity!)

Anyway ... for a while back then, it looked like the "authorities" had learnt the lessons from CREATIVITY leaving our shores and enriching other countries first!

Or did they?

Hmmm ... the lament seems to continue about Singapore not having a large enough pool of talented Singaporeans, so that we need yet another OFFICIAL POLICY -- this time, it's to bring in "foreign talent" ...

Perhaps, we do have a lack of local talent, or perhaps we don't ... are these local talent no longer "local", having gone overseas to what they perceived to be freer (and not just greener) pastures? Or, are these local talent playing the "siam" (take cover) game? If yes, what the heck for? If not hiding, where are they -- have they "quitted" Singapore ... to become some other country's (e.g., USA's) "foreign talent" (another aspect of divine justice)?

So, don't interfere with something as personal (and as apparently trivial) as length of hair ... it is a very overt declaration of INDEPENDENCE, being willing to "stand out from the crowd" and "think outside the box", to be FREE to "express oneself" and to "do your thing" without sanction or interference from the powers that be!

Ignore hair length at your peril!
(I am NOT kidding!)

This is my first entry into this blog, so I am just going to write something about the last three days ... well, actually nothing much has happened to my life (which is as simple as I know how to make it -- give credit to my Zen teachers, haha!) ...

Well, here goes nothing ...

1. Bought a brand new "MTV/MP4/REC/FM" player that has 1G flash memory and is about the size of a credit card or matchbox ...
       It's lighter than a matchbox that's full of matches but slightly heavier than a credit card. Brand is something called SOYU, but these players are now so commoditised (like the PC) that I don't want to pay "top dollars" just to buy a so-called branded item ...
       This way, I get to test several makes of players with the money that would have gone into just one "branded" player. Price of the SOYU player: S$210.
       Still testing it to see how well it really plays audio and video files, as well as graphic stills (images) and text files, and how long the built-in lithium battery can hold charge. Not really that interested in the FM radio feature.
   
   
   

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2. Bought another three CD's of praise/worship songs, for a special price of S$10 ... Titles: Praise 'n' Worship Volume 2; Trust in You; Contemporary Christian Hits.
       Two or three weeks ago, I had already bought Praise 'n' Worship Volume 1, for S$4; also, a Living Faith Church friend (LILIAN) had helped me to secure an excellent CD entitled "Top 25 Praise Songs", for just under S$25.
       Converting/ripping these CDs into MP3 for my new MP3 players ... that's purposely plural because a week or so before buying that SOYU MP4 player, I bought a 256MB MP3 player, brand LE -- for which I have converted some praise/worship songs into MP3; I have passed the LE player to my wife for her to enjoy the songs.
       Later, I will pass the SOYU player to my wife for her to watch MATTHEW in four parts (not in mpg format, which is too large; but will convert mpg's into wmv's). That's the plan, anyway.

All in, it has been a good 3 days.

'Nuff said!