Albert Tanutama

The underwater creatures have never ceased to amaze me, from the fortunate ones in the SeaWorld to the unfortunate ones in NTUC Market. I could watch them for hours (uhm, not the one in the supermarket tho). Thus, last weekend was really special because me and Nicknox took the opportunity to see them face-to-face in the open sea; we went diving at Pulau Dayang.

So what does it take to visit those fishes ?

1. Choose one of the internationally recognised scuba-diving associations. Ours was NAUI. It is the world’s oldest not-for-profit membership training agency that focuses on dive safety through education. Other popular diver training association is PADI. PADI courses are usually shorter than other dive programs, and more practical. A certification from those organizations will allow people to dive, hire diving equipment or fill diving cylinders from most of the dive shops and compressor operators worldwide.

2. Find a training school. Ours was conducted by Mako Sub-Aquatics which is located in Ayer Rajah Industrial Park. It is a small diving school with a number of friendly instructors. They make the whole learning process easier and fun. In addition, Mako has their own diving equipments for rental and for sale.

3. Attend diving classes. There are three parts: classroom, pool, and open water. The classroom session covers topics such as diving equipments, physics, environment and safety – highlighting things that might go wrong and how to overcome them. There were two classroom sessions to cover those topics, followed by the pool session. The session was conducted in Outram Secondary School. We were asked to swim eight laps followed by 10 minutes floating exercise to fulfill basic diving requirements. Afterward, we learned skin diving techniques using mask, snorkle and fins. The diving mask was specifically designed to prevent us breathing through the nose, therefore we had to rely on our mouth to breath. Unfortunately, beside the air – I had the other “air” (water) got inside my body ^-^”. After a short lunch (BYO – bring your own as there were no food center nearby), we finally wore our full scuba gears which consist of wet suit, weight belt, bouyancy control, air tank and regulator. The air from the tank was slightly cool and dry, however there was no other impact in breathing. We learned several important diving techniques such as weight belt ditch & don, underwater mask clearing (extremely useful), regulator clearing and recovery, Scuba tank ditch & don (tricky, I was entangled couple of times) as well as a couple emergency techniques such as air sharing and emergency ascent. We had a really intensive training that day – from 9 to about 4 o’clock – along with heavy rain.

I’ll continue with what happened afterwards in my next post…

ChinesePod by Ken Carrol and Jenny Zhu provides easy to follow audio recording (a.k.a podcast) to help people learn Chinese language. This is their pitch:

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Joi Ito shared some thoughtful tips on blogging

…,be humble and don’t try to write something conclusively smart-sounding. Start a discussion where someone smarter than you can step in easily.

I’m learning to keep this one in mind

This is about an event occured a month ago. In early September, Quark revealed their new logo. Unfortunately, the excitement of the team is short-lived. The newly launched “Q” logo is noted as visually identical with the existing Scottish Arts Council (SAC) “A” logo.

The incident, which involves Quark as a high-profile company in the graphic arts, has raised attention to a number of creative and legal issues. Mike Davidson, for example, posted about this ongoing and worsening problem in creating original logo design. It is easy to fall into what he described as three different types of logo theft. Meanwhile, Gene Gable from creativepro.com highlighted the legal complexity to develop and protect unique and difficult-to-copy brands.

The main problem, however, was on the embarassment when the “wonderful” superlatives used by the designer to describe the uniqueness of their design have backfired. Designers are often asked to describe their design concepts, and this where the problem starts. We use “a thousand words” to impress and to justify our creative efforts. We feel that people need to be enlightened to understand their art. However, that’s not true because people just know when they like something (say, Apple). They just want to know how to express what they feel and that should not requires fancy, pretentious, superlatives word (Refreshing innovation as conveyed by an Apple? – yikes). Eventually, a good description is useful because it will give us a common understanding, but design should not be judged on how well it is described. Afterall, an Apple is just… well… an apple.

This post celebrated two joyful events last weekend – the wedding of our classmates and the reunion small group of SAS LT20 students. It is a blessing to witness friendship now united in holy matrimony and to catch up with ol’ friends. Not to mention a rare opportunity of group photos

Tagging (or labeling) has become increasingly popular approach to organize digital objects (files, emails, pictures, and so on) than categorization. Its popularity is attributed by Rashmi Sinha to the way it simplifies organizing those objects for future retrieval by eliminating the cognitive cost of categorization (a.k.a no-brainer). Barb Dybwad, from thesocialsoftware weblog added that “the process (of tagging) is no longer one of narrowing but of expanding — it’s more like brainstorming than like analysis”. It liberates from thinking, creates a pathway to possible discovery and mental pleasure.

Tagging works through association. By associating digital objects with a number of concepts, we create clues and entry points that will help us find those objects again in the future. However, there might be some sort of natural limitation exist in this approach – which will occur because association is “flat”. As the number of digital objects with similar features appear – tagging could fail because we have no idea how those clues are related. It is the hidden cost of keeping cognitive effort low. Eventually, we might have to use back some sort of categorization in naming the tag or use automatic clustering system to reveal the invisible relationship of those tags.