Teen returns home to find family among quake dead

11:47 AM Internet at Every Where


MALALAK, Indonesia (CNN) -- Septiani Lenianingsih stands off to the side, away from the crowds that have gathered to watch the backhoe at work.

The land the machine is plowing through was once the village of Malalak, but it's now a mass grave.

Septiani, 18, watches silently, speaking only in whispers to her uncle who is helping direct the search for bodies swallowed up in the massive landslide triggered by Sumatra's earthquake last week.

She was at her boarding school when it all happened, she tells us. She learned from the news that her village was damaged and tried frantically to get in touch with her family over the phone. No one had the heart to tell her her family was dead.

When she arrived at the site where her home once stood in Malalak, there were no younger brothers and sister running out to greet her. All that was left in place of her home was dirt.

She was left orphaned, alone. Her young face reflects the intense sorrow she is still getting used to.

Read the full story more at the source.

Source: cnn.com

Major Earthquake Strikes Indonesia

3:49 AM Internet at Every Where

JAKARTA, Indonesia -- Six people were killed in Indonesia after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Wednesday, officials said.

The quake was initially categorized as magnitude 7.4 before being downgraded to 7.0 by geological officials.

No details were immediately available about the deaths. At least 18 other people were injured around the capital, Jakarta, said Rustam Pakaya, a health ministry spokesman.

A tsunami watch went into effect and quickly expired, according to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.

It struck about 2:55 p.m. (3:55 a.m. ET) and was centered 242 km (150 miles) from Jakarta, according the U.S. Geological Survey. The quake was about 60 km (37.3 miles) deep.

In Tasikmalaya, a city in the Indonesian island of Java, some older buildings were damaged and people panicked in the streets because there was no electricity, according to a witness named Maya.
Tasikmalaya is about 142 km (88 miles) from the epicenter. Several homes in that city were destroyed and a building collapsed, the health ministry spokesman said.

John Aglionby, a journalist with the Financial Times, was in Jakarta during the quake.

"The whole building started to sway. People got very serious," Aglionby told CNN. "People left the building. But there was no sign of damage here."

About three weeks ago, a series of earthquakes - ranging in magnitude from 4.7 to 6.7 - struck off the western coast of Indonesia's Sumatra Island.

At least seven people were injured and one building collapsed in Padang City in West Sumatra, officials said.

Source: cnn.com/asia

About Aung San Suu Kyi

12:18 PM Internet at Every Where

Aung San Suu Kyi (pronounced Ong San Soo Chee), Burma's pro-democracy leader and Nobel Peace laureate, symbolises the struggle of Burma's people to be free. She has been detained for over 13 years by the Burmese regime for campaigning for human rights and democracy in Burma.
Recent developments

She is currently facing trial in Burma. She was on arrested on May 14th and is now being held in Insein Prison, a prison notorious for its terrible conditions and horrific treatment of prisoners. Aung San Suu Kyi is being tried for breaking the terms of her house arrest, which forbids visitors, after an American man, John Yettaw, swam across Inya Lake and refused to leave her house. Her trial began on 18th May.

Aung San Suu Kyi has committed no crime, she is the victim of crime, yet is currently facing a sentence of 3-5 years. The United Nations has ruled that Aung San Suu Kyi's detention is illegal under international law, and also under Burmese law. The United Nations Security Council has also told the dictatorship that they must release Aung San Suu Kyi.

Political prisoners in Burma are routinely subjected to torture and often denied medical treatment. There are serious concerns for Aung San Suu Kyi's health in these conditions, particularly as she has recently been seriously ill.
About Aung San Suu Kyi

She was born on June 19th, 1945 to Burma's independence hero, Aung San, who was assassinated when she was only two years old.

Aung San Suu Kyi was educated in Burma, India, and the United Kingdom. While studying at Oxford University, she met Michael Aris, a Tibet scholar who she married in 1972. They had two sons, Alexander and Kim. On March 27 1999, while Aung San Suu Kyi was in Burma, Michael Aris died of cancer in London. He had petitioned the Burmese authorities to allow him to visit Suu Kyi one last time, but they had rejected his request. He had not seen her since a Christmas visit in 1995. The government always urged Suu Kyi to join her family abroad, but she knew that she would not be allowed to return.

Aung San Suu Kyi had returned to Burma in 1988 to nurse her dying mother and was immediately plunged into the country's nationwide democracy uprising. Joining the newly-formed National League for Democracy (NLD), Suu Kyi gave numerous speeches calling for freedom and democracy. The military regime responded to the uprising with brute force, killing up to 5,000 demonstrators. Unable to maintain its grip on power, the regime was forced to call a general election in 1990.

As Aung San Suu Kyi began to campaign for the NLD, she and many others were detained by the regime. Despite being held under house arrest, the NLD went on to win a staggering 82% of the seats in parliament. The regime never recognized the results of the election.

Aung San Suu Kyi has been in and out of arrest ever since. She was held under house arrest from 1989-1995, and again from 2000-2002. She was again arrested in May 2003 after the Depayin massacre, during which up to 100 of her supporters were beaten to death by the regime's militia. Her phone line has been cut, her post is intercepted and National League for Democracy volunteers providing security at her compound were removed in December 2004.

She has won numerous international awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize, the Sakharov Prize from the European Parliament and the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom. She has called on people around the world to join the struggle for freedom in Burma, saying "Please use your liberty to promote ours".

Source: www.64forsuu.org

Key events in the life of Aung San Suu Kyi

11:26 AM Internet at Every Where

Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi is the daughter of Myanmar�s independence hero, Gen. Aung San, who was assassinated when she was two years old, but she fell into politics almost by accident.

* Born in Yangon, formerly Rangoon, on June 19, 1945.
* Earned degrees in philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University in England. Married British academic Michael Aris in 1972 and has two children who live in Britain.
* Rushed back to Burma, later renamed Myanmar, in 1988 to care for her ailing mother. Her trip coincided with mass demonstrations against military government that left thousands dead. She became rallying figure and helped found the National League for Democracy party.
* Arrested in 1989 on charges of inciting unrest and kept under house arrest for the next six years.
* Barred from running in elections called by the junta in May 1990. Her party won 392 of 495 seats in parliament, but military refused to honor the results, and she became symbol of Myanmar�s suppressed democracy.
* Won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991.
* Released from prison in 1995 but generals continued to arrest her supporters and prevent her from travelling outside the capital.
* Her husband, who had cancer, was refused permission to visit her before he died in 1999.
* Put under house arrest again in 2000, released unconditionally in 2002 and re-arrested in May 2003. Her current detention was due to expire May 27, 2009.
* Arrested on May 14 and charged with violating her house arrest after uninvited American man swam to her home and stayed two days.
* Convicted on Aug 11 of violating her house arrest and sentenced to three years in prison, which was reduced by junta chief to 18 months under house arrest.

Link: 64 for Suu campaign

Shopping for watches in Penang? To quartz or not to quartz should be the first question instead.

3:37 AM Internet at Every Where

TO QUARTZ OR NOT TO QUARTZ

A potential wristwatch collector should know that wristwatches sold nowadays are powered either by a mechanical movement or a battery. The former is referred to as a "mechanical watch" (with either an automatic or manual winding mechanism) and the latter is simply called "a quartz". There is a class of watches powered by "kinetic energy" and they will be discussed later.

Mechanical wristwatches made an appearance in the late 1700s and Queen Elizabeth I was known to wear one decorated with precious jewels. By 1928 mechanical wristwatches were outselling pocket watches.

Of course, all early wristwatches had a mechanical movement but a dramatic change occurred in 1957 when Hamilton (an American watch company) replaced the mainspring of the watch with a battery that lasted well over a year. in 1960, Bulova (another American company) made its Accutron model with an exclusive tuning fork system that was powered by a battery. Nine years later, Seiko launched its first quartz watch, the Astron 35SQ which was claimed to be the most accurate watch in the world. Timex of England followed with their quartz model, the Electric. These examples show briefly the early development of quartz technology in watches.

The 1980s saw the Japanese flooding the world with cheap quartz watches and this marked the beginning of the quartz era. With quartz technology, wristwatches are much easier to make than mechanical watches and they could be mass produced on assembly lines. This made watchmaking cheap and profitable and many new companies (including unscrupulous ones with no experience in watchmaking) jumped on the time bandwagon.

The Swiss, whose name is synonymous with watchmaking, were too much bound by tradition to be able to accept quickly the concept of a battery powered watch, consisting of a mere electrical circuit and a mundane case assembled on impersonal production lines. To them the quartz was a pariah.

They were slow to react to the Japanese onslaught but they eventually came up with a savvy answer in the form of Swatch, which we will discuss in detail in a future article. Many famous Swiss watchmaking houses also started to include a line of quartz watches in their catalogues. Names like Rolex and Patek Philippe were the early ones to have quartz watches to offer their customers but there were still a few Swiss watchmakers who looked at quartz with disdain. The famous house of Blancpain advertised as follows. "Since 1735 there has never been a quartz Blancpain watch. And there never will be. Another established Swiss watchmaker, Oris, makes only mechanical watches and advertises this fact.

However, cheaper production methods created by advances in technology are hard to resist and of the 40.1 million watches exported from Switzerland in 1992, 87.8 per cent of them were quartz.

Therefore, what should the answer be to the intending watch collector? To quartz or not to quartz?

I have learnt not to be fond of those battery operated watches unless they are of the cheap variety like those made by Swatch. After all, quartz technology has enabled watchmakers to produce cheap quartz watches and some are sold for less than RM10 each.

If you intend to buy an expensive watch, you should opt for a mechanical watch consisting of traditional mechanical parts assembled by skilled craftsmen rather than a quartz with an innocuous circuit board, step motor, resonator and a battery of unknown parentage mated together by robots on an assembly line. If you open up a quartz watch and look inside, you will know what I mean.

While the various movements of a mechanical watch are time tested and their designs well-known to collectors, the quartz movement remains a mystery. When one buys an expensive quartz wristwatch, there is no way of telling whether it has an expensive quartz movement or a cheap one. All that the quartz circuit maker will say is that the movement is "very advanced and accurate" etc and no technical details or circuit plans are disclosed.

Defenders of quartz will say that constant R & D has improved the quartz movement tremendously and batteries are now fail safe (non-leak) and that some last almost 10 years. Cartier is one upmarket watchmaker which believes in quartz and its latest quartz called 202P, is a very much improved version of its first generation quartz movement. This is used in the latest editions of the Cartier Pasha, Santos, Panthere and Diabolo.

Rolex has a quartz, the Oysterquartz Day-Date Chronometer in 18-carat gold (with bezel, dial and bracelet set in diamonds) that carries a list price of RM131,083. Patek Philippe's Nautilus with quartz movements are also very upmarket and expensive watches. The Audemars Piquet Royal Oak Championship (dedicated to Nick Faldo) is a limited edition of just 500 watches and it is available only in quartz.

However, the BIG question remains. Can a quartz watch last as long as a mechanical one? My personal experience says "NO". I bought a Cartier Santos in 1981 for RM2700 and the quartz movement lasted only 5 years. The entire quartz circuit was replaced in 1986 for RM480. Another Cartier (a ladies model) bought in 1982 for RM1300 lasted only 4 years and the entire quartz movement had to be changed twice by the agents in Singapore before the watch could be put right. A Seiko "calculator watch" bought in 1980 for RM900 was declared a write-off a year later due to a faulty battery that leaked into the quartz circuit thus ruining it.

These three cases involved the early 1st generation quartz movements but I still think that quartz technology has a long way to go and the search for the perfect battery has yet to end. The watch with the mechanical movement will always remain the favourite of watch collectors. True collectors choose an item for its beauty, function and history. The making of a mechanical watch is an art by itself, from the making of the various mechanical parts to its assembly by skilled craftsmen. Many mechanical wristwatches continue to be reliable timepieces today despite having gone through decades of use.

A quartz movement is no feast for the eyes but take a look at the Patek Philippe Minute Repeater or any other complicated watches and it is to behold true beauty. Even an ordinary mechanical movement (ETA) is pleasing to look at.

Here is a story of one of my favourite watches in my collection, a mechanical timepiece made by Vacheron Constantin. I bought this watch in Zurich in 1974 and paid a small ransom for it. At that time this watch was billed as the "thinnest automatic watch in the world". I saw the watch while passing a shop window and at once, I knew I had to buy it. It was one of the most exquisite timepieces I have ever seen and owned.

I was advised that the watch should be sent back to the factory in Switzerland for servicing every two years and I did that diligently until 1990. Sometime in mid 1990, I found that the watch was running fast and I happened to be in Singapore. I took it to a shop in Lucky Plaza which had a sign to say they were authorised agents for Vacheron Constantin. They opened the watch to do the adjustments but the result was worse, the watch ran even faster. No matter what they did for the next few hours, they could not put it right.

They then contacted the main agents in Singapore who told them that my watch should only be opened and serviced in the factory in Switzerland due to the special caliber 838 movement used. The watch was then sent back to Switzerland and it came back after two months running perfectly. There was no charge for the work as they acknowledged the problem was caused by one of their sub-agent's ignorance. The company wrote me an apology and the letter also stated that the person who re-assembled my watch was the same craftsman who assembled it in 1974. I don't suppose a quartz watch will give you this kind of experience.

Remember that time is measured by fine caliber movements and not by a leaking battery.


Ref: This article was first published in the July 1993 issue of Asian Auto, Malaysia's leading motoring magazine

Source: PenangTalk.com

Note from mainadmin: Watchery has long been an interest of mine. One day I was looking around at a friend's price search site and to my surprise he actually had an Astronaut's watch listed in his database. Astronaut? Owning a watch that was designed for outerspace, imagine that, and you can own one for just USD1100, hey that isn't too bad. Not ridiculously expensive like what someone would expect. It's even cheaper than certain models of Tag Heuers. So is it truly an Astronaut standard issued watch or merely just another misleading marketing gimmick. BTW, I'm a no quartz person :)

Latest tsunami buoys deployed off coast of northern Malaysia

9:44 PM Internet at Every Where


A bunch of friends and I recently spotted this high-tech looking tsunami early-warning buoy in a beach off the northwestern coast of Penang Island. This buoy was just about to be deployed when we stumbled upon it during a weekend getaway trip to a well known but secluded beach called Kerachuterdam Beach. At least we can rest a little easier now knowing that the government is using tax payers money wisely by purchasing these high-tech contraptions which hopefully once deployed will help provide early warnings to the public of impending tsunami threats in the future.

A search on Google for the manufacturer of this tsunami buoy came up with this:
The SEAWATCH MINI ll buoy is a small buoy designed for coastal applications but it can also measure directional waves further offshore. It is well suited as a wave measurement buoy but can also be fitted with a certain number of metocean and water quality sensors.

Features:
� Small and easy to transport.
� Ideal for directional wave measurements.
� Insensitive to spinning and rough handling.
� Real-time data transfer and presentation.
� Full onboard processing of all measured data.
� Two-way communication link for data transfer and control of a number of buoys.
� Special mooring design minimizes mooring influence on buoy motions.

Source: Seawatch