Oath of a Minister in the Parliament

Currently the ministers of the next Cabinet are being sworn in with he following oath:

I (Ryan) do swear by the (holy book) that I will bear true faith and allegiance to Trinidad and Tobago and I will uphold the constitution and the law, that I will conscientiously, impartially, and to the best of my ability discharge my duty as Minister of (Music), and do right to all manner of people without fear or favor, affection or ill will.

The full list of representatives can be seen here

May 26th, 2010

What a day eh? The day the first female Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago is sworn in. The first heavy rain showers of the season and widespread flooding and damage and loss of property. My one week mark for doing the P90X program.

Kamla Persad-Bissessar I think sounded the way a Prime Minister is supposed to sound when she speaks, and says she is going to follow through on her promises. When she was outside after the ceremony she made her body guards loosen the area around her to get more intimate with the barrage of reporters. I think this speaks mountains about her and what we can expect to see with transparency and openness with her government. The first thing the new Prime Minister said is going to deal with is the flooding disaster, see what was immediately needed and put it into action, sounds simple enough. Maybe now the local government will get proper manpower assigned to them. We have more rain on the way so promises need to be kept.

My muscles and ligaments all over are sore from exercising everyday for the last week. The P90X program is about 1 hour workout a day with different routines each day. Yesterday it was my calves in pain, today it is my shoulders. I love the idea of working out without using big machines, only using dumbbells and my own body weight. I still have to get the eating part right as I am still eating a large meal for dinner and junk during the day.

I also watched Slumdog Millionaire last night, good movie. It showed the dirty parts of India without being too dirty. Many people really do have it badly in India and we have it quite well here in Trinidad. Appreciate what we have and do not take it for granted.

Trinidad Election Results 2010

The People's Partnership has won the May 24th 2010 general elections. In fact it was a landslide victory of 29 seats against the PNM's 12 seats. This gives them the coveted two thirds majority to change the constitution.

This national victory is 4 months after the internal elections and the defeat of UNC founder Basdeo Panday with Kamla Persad-Bissessar winning on a 10:1 advantage. This means she has without a doubt the faith of the UNC supporters and now the whole nation in her.

She will be sworn in today as the first female Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago.

Read more about it here http://www.trinidadexpress.com/index.pl/nart?id=161677244&weba=NWSNews
and http://www.trinidadexpress.com/index.pl/article_news?id=161679412

Voter meggie

Juice in a Sony Vaio laptop

This is what happens when you let juice go into your laptop and don't immediately power it off completely and dry it before checking to see if it works. The first picturs is of shorted out resistors. The second is a chip with many pins shorted and burnt next to more shorted resistors. This particular laptop is a Sony Vaio VGN-NS10L (PCG-7144M)

You would think that with all the brains in sony they would put a cover to access the hard drive just as they did with the memory and as most other laptops are made. In order to get this hard drive out I had to remove 25 screws. It is a standard sata hard drive so I cannot imagine why it is not accessible easily like the ram. Bad Sony. The motherboard is mounted upside down so when I tried to boot the machine with the cover open I had to be careful not to shift parts when I opened the laptop to press the power button.

Review: The Bad Lieutenant Port of Call New Orleans

Waste of time watching this. The iguanas were absolutely unnecessary, then add the bad camera work to it, poor. The Bad Lieutenant Port  of Call New Orleans gets 1 star.

More about FOOD mmmmm

More trini food recipes, for free
http://www.trinigourmet.com/

 

The Naparima Girls Cook Book is around $200 TTD at bookstores in Trinidad but $70 USD for the soft cover right now on amazon.com WOW!

The Uff Report

http://www.knowtnt.com/node/140

Take a read of the report from the above link for serious proof that the current government does not deserve another term in office.

Polar bears and penguins

Polar bears live at the North pole. Penguins live at the South pole. The only time we see them together is in illustrations on ads and post cards which may be why it is not widely known that they live on opposite sides on the globe.
The word 'Arctic' comes from a greek word that means bear and 'Antarctic' comes from a word that means without bear. 

I recommend checking these
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PolarBearsAndPenguins
http://sciencewoman.blogspot.com/2006/11/polar-bears-and-penguins.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic

My Blood Type

My blood type is B+
What's yours?

HP Pavilion dv 6915nr laptop not booting, all lights on steady

I saw an HP Pavilion dv6915nr laptop that was basically not booting. When it was powered on all lights stayed on on steady, no beeps, blank screen. The problem was one of the ram slots is bad. There was one 2gb stick and one 1gb stick installed. In the slot higher off the board both sticks work but the system fails to boot if either stick is placed in the slot closer to the board. The system is stable with one stick so the 2gb stick stays. The machine is running Vista 32 bit SP1.

Trinidad poverty rate

I heard the minister of finance last night saying Trinidad is not being mismanaged and that we have money in the bank and high employment rate. She backed it up with particular numbers from the Central Bank and International reports.

She failed to mention that Trinidad also has a high number of people still below the poverty line. http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_pop_bel_pov_lin-economy-population-below-poverty-line

Over $400 BILLION spent and people still suffering. That is gross mismanagement.

We may have a happy and healthy economy but not a happy and healthy population.

How to check for Wifi interference

Many people set up their own wireless networks without being aware of other networks in the area. There are basically 3 non-overlapping channels available. You can use any one but how do you really know which one to choose or which is the least congested and at what times. The most obvious symptom of interference is not seeing the network at all or intermittent dropping. These can also mean a defective access point (AP) or wifi card but I am assuming they are working properly.

You also need to minimise and be aware of interference from other electrical devices as outlined here.

Wifi has intelligent features to be able to work in an area with multiple networks but with more congestion you lose bandwidth and throughput. Your AP will transmit at a slower rate when other AP's are in the area and using similar frequencies. Multiple AP's using the same frequencies is as if each AP is a person talking to someone next to them in a small room. If both talk at the same time(transmit) they will not always be understood by a listener (your computer).

If you stream data via wireless in a congested area you will be bottle necked and might have regular breaks in the video or music as it buffers. If you are just browsing the internet of opening work files via wireless you will probably not notice the bottleneck as these are not as bandwidth intensive as streaming videos or music. The default on most access points is channel 6 so it will probably the most common as most people will not change it.


 inSSIDer is a tool that lets you check for other wifi networks using the wifi card on your own computer. It does not matter who the owner is, your neighbour, work, apartment building, etc. It gives a visual representation of other wifi networks in the area and what channels they use. I am not sure if it detects 'a' and 'n' networks but I am sure it sees 'b' and 'g' networks. Choose a channel that is empty or that has the least activity. If you do not stream from one computer to another via wifi you should at least get your full internet throughput on your wireless device. Check your throughput on www.speedtest.net on a wired computer and then check it on your wireless computer, they should be very similar.

Check out this article to boost your signal strength: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/cover-home-find-remove-wireless-blind-spots/

If you like what you read please leave a reaction or comment!

TTD being wasted

http://www.newsday.co.tt/businessday/0,119127.html
http://guardian.co.tt/business/business/2010/01/24/trini-train-track
http://www.theengineer.co.uk/news/trinidad-chooses-trinitrain/305605.article

Lots has already been spent by the government on the Rapid Rail project and the people of the country have YET TO BE consulted with and the project is destined to cost 10's of Billions to build and maintain. The farmers and their families are unlikely to be fairly compensated and the country will further suffer from a lower supply of crops. I was listening to 103.1 and they had the man who made the original 2020 plan for the PNM government and he said Patrick is not following the plan. First you develop utilities and infrastructure, the people and other assets etc. Lastly, closer to 2020, you build your showpiece capital. Patrick has only used the parts of the plan that suits him best, why was his house the first to be fixed and not the rest of the country. Yes a lot has been spent on community projects and education, but too much wastage and corrupt deals with foreign entities is not what the current government should be asking us to let them keep on doing.

The God of data

           

                  VS

 http://www.alexpooley.com/2008/03/26/google-the-god-of-data/

For some reason I have been wondering who(or what) is the God of Data, or who it should be, as in a mythological person type thing (is that proper English?). I did a search (on google, yes) and found the link above as the first hit, because it seems to be the only page with that title. From the old days you have other Gods as explained here. Currently there is no question that Google is the biggest data monger and is the company others are trying to be. Google has crawlers for the whole net and cached versions of pages kept for who knows how long, no doubt in redundant locations. This along with millions of users' emails accounts each with a capacity of over 7 GB put them in control of an almost unimaginable amount of data. I really hope those negative predictions of them from years ago do not come through. Those predictions were from 5 or more years ago, before Latitude, Maps, Earth, Sky, Blogger, Youtube, Books, Voice, Chrome, Android, Docs, Calendar, Video, Apps marketplace, Code, fee based storage, free email and Sites, etc etc... I probably missed a few too but that is a long list of well used services that has given them more reach than anyone else right now. Microsoft has tried and failed with their remade search engine aka Bing, it looks and maybe even 'feels' better than Google but it does not return results as well. The fact that 'google' was officially made a verb says the company is a household name.

This young generation does not know a world without it, and nothing is wrong with that. Knowledge should be easily accessible to everyone.So far they have seemingly managed to walk the right path for data management. Apps for every kind of device have been put out to make accessing Google easier. They have followed orders to censor sites by the Chinese government although they turned that around recently. It is also quite likely that they work hand in hand with the US and European governments to at least monitor traffic. The Gmail service went down twice that I remember last year but with no reported loss of data, though I'm sure some productivity was lost. Android has so far been a big hit and looks like it will continue to gain momentum as more people see it in action from friends and devices start to come down in prices. I am a fan of their services as they usually get it right, although Wave and Buzz have seemed to not quite cut it.

This article talks about Facebook vs Google. It has been and will continue being a bitter battle as both companies offer unique services but both are chasing revenue from targeted ads. Facebook has work hard to hide its data from Google and you can't blame them as Google digs pretty deep into sites. I can see that the Facebook version of search in the future will be more useful as search results will be more 'localised' with opinions from friends and other people in your region. If they add the depth and scope of a Google search they may have the winning formula down the road. Facebook too keeps data cached and with over 400 million active users it has an astonishing amount of data to dig into. I think one key selling point for both companies is their services are mostly free, you pay for extras but even then it is still cheap.

In the future we can expect apparently a much more diverse set of services from Google. Health (or whatever the name is) will likely be a place to keep your medical records and related data in a central place easily accessible when you need it. Google Energy is going to expand most likely into something on a grand scale and at least allow Google to perhaps be self sufficient and maybe even be able to sell the excess energy. Facebook will eventually allow parental controls and be a serious search engine. It is definitely something exciting to follow.

Both companies trace your movement on the internet, keeping note of where you go, when, for how long and what you say as in the case of your emails being read in Gmail and ads displayed accordingly.Neither of them will ever give up ownership of their data, Google is more open about letting users transfer out and export data but it still keeps it afterwards, Facebook locks you into their site and keeps all data indefinitely.

Right now Google is probably the winner but the battle is on and it will be one of the greatest battles ever.