Blog from the Loft

I give up. I used to love ACDSee, the Windows image viewer program. I used version 5.0 for a long time and have been recommending it too everyone. It is full featured, and most importantly, fast. Version 6.0 came out and I upgraded. What a disappointment ! It is so slow that it is unusable. [...]

[Read more →]

Just finished reading and taking notes from The Ice palace that Melted Away, restoring civility and other lost virtues to everyday life, by Bill Stumpf. He is better known as the designer of the Aeron chair. You can read my notes here.

[Read more →]

Some resources for my loft design
Appliances

ventless washer dryer

ASKO manufacturer

LG manufacturer

Russound whole house audio and video distribution.

B&W speakers

Rotating AV Racks

Vimco, Lutron Controllable Shades

Lutron lighting control

Snake Tray for wiring, probably too industrial

Art work hanging systems

Art work hanging system 2

Avanti systems specifically from the UK

Furniture:

Topdeq office furniture
Bamboo Floorings
OCHO concrete furniture
Not quite home loft, but and article onoffice design, [...]

[Read more →]

Article in Wall Street Journal yesterday (2003.11.19) describe domestic helps in Hong Kong often include computer work as part of the domestic chores. Cleaning virus, uploading pictures, data entry are just part of the job. There are domestic helper specific computer classes offer at YMCA and other schools. It is a booming business. Hong Kong [...]

[Read more →]

It may be surprising, but one of the best ecommerce site I use is theUpton Tea website. It is simple to use, has a lot of user selectable options, product pictures, everything to make shopping and browsing efficient and fun. Check them out, and order some tea.

[Read more →]

I bought a new fountain pen yesterday. I spend a lot of my time listening, thinking, reading, typing, and writing. Writing instrument is one of the very important human-machine interfaces I use. For the last few years I found a very good pen, a cheap gel pen, the Sarasa made by Zebra. I used to [...]

[Read more →]

I needed to setup a few virtual host on a Apache web server to do some testing. This is 1.3x Apache on a Linux box. I always forget that once named virtual host is enabled, you have to include a virtual host entry for the “default” server address/name, i.e. the server for the ServerName server. [...]

[Read more →]

From Slashdot, Ghost in the Shell 2

[Read more →]

As I was leaving one of my favorite hotels in Singapore, I saw some kid of VIP reception at the entrance. All the staff were lining up (queuing up) outside. This lady got out of a mercedes. They proceeded to introduce everyone, handed her flowers, and more introduction. Being Singapore, it was English, Cantonese, Mandarin [...]

[Read more →]

Singapore –
If you can find one of these real eating places near the Chinatown area for real people, you can sample more fresh sugar cane juice and also the famous oyster omlette. It is made with baby oysters that are very flavorful.

That is fresh durian meat packaged at the back of the red hairy fruit, [...]

[Read more →]