No more blotchy notebooks and vivid colours for me. I felt like I’d lost myself in that notebook theme… it was too messy, too fancy. I like things clean, simple, white. Minimalistic stuff. So I found this theme which hovers somewhere in between all the previous white-based themes I had… and there. I’m back. My photos in the headers are, too.

Comments now support Gravatars, so you can have a pretty little avi by your name whenever you leave a note on the blog.

After more than a year of snakeless sightings at Buloh (for myself, at least), we stroke it lucky with a double whip and a [dead] croc. Being too lazy to write about them myself, I'll just prod you towards budak’s posts here and here (and less relatedly, here).

Juvenile Oriental Whip

Pwoor croc

Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short.

~ Frank Herbert’s Heretics of Dune, book V of the Dune Chronicles

Dogged wanderings, all of ‘em… ‘Paws at the Beach‘ at East Coast Park, in celebration of World Animal Day 2008. My sis and I came back smelling like a-few-dozen-dogs-in-one, and Dofu gave us a thorough sniff-over when we returned. She was full of snorts.

More photos on Zoto

Female juvenile Changeable lizard

Whimbrels - possibly the best waders-in-flight shot I’ve taken in Singapore thus far

The global financial networks of the new economy are inherently unstable. They produce random patterns of informational turbulence that may destabilize any company, as well as entire countries or regions, regardless of their economic performances.

At the existential human level, the most alarming feature of the new economy may be that it is shaped in very fundamental ways by machines. The so-called ‘global market’, strictly speaking, is not a market at all but a network of machines programmed according to a single value - money-making for the sake of making money - to the exclusion of all other values. In the words of Manuel Castells:

“The outcome of the process of financial globalization may be that we have created an Automaton at the core of our economies that is decisively conditioning our lives. Humankind’s nightmare of seeing our machines taking control of our world seems on the edge of becoming reality - not in the form of robots that eliminate jobs or government computers that police our lives, but as an electronically based system of financial transactions.”

~ Fritjof Capra, The Hidden Connections: A Science for Sustainable Living (2002)

Ever flipped back and forth, and back and forth, through pages and pages of printed material and wished there was a Ctrl+F?

Composite of 400mm, ISO 200, f/5.6, 1/8s + ditto, 1/200s

Nikon D200 + Nikon Fieldscope ED78 (= 1000mm) + attachment