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Sunday afternoon at 40 Hands coffee

www.40handscoffee.com
A rather good place for coffee, less painfully hip than most and able to actually deliver on the good coffee part. A little stuffy on the inside, but there are outdoor areas that will still keep you out of light rain, as we found out today. I think I’d pick this place over Loysel’s Toy and Papa Palheta, but that might just be because I like this name* a whole lot more than those two. Strangelets, a small store with painfully-hip accessories and homeware, is across the street having moved from the Tanjong Pagar area.

* Supposedly coffee passes through an average of 40 hands on its way from the fields to your cup.

Bario ramen, Ramen Champion (Iluma)

What I said on Instagram: “One garlicky son of a bitch with coarse, chewy noodles made from bread dough”, “If you like garlic, salt, and fat… best I ever had of the sort”.

There’s a sign on the outside that claims they came in #1 in a poll of ramen that a man would choose, and I’d agree with that assessment. This is a huge, Go Go Curry Major/Grand Slam Curry-sized meal, with a generous helping of everything, and a salty soup that could dehydrate a cactus and kill a vampire in a single stroke. Quite simply, someone dared to take ramen to 11, and this is it.

Switched from SingNet DSL to StarHub Fiber today. Here are the Speedtest results.

We never got the theoretical maximum speed of SingNet’s 6mbps down, 512kbps up plan, so I don’t consider it to be a bottleneck for download speeds (even in the best case scenario of a Singapore-based server, it didn’t come up against the 6mbps ceiling). The StarHub fiber plan is capped at 50mbps down, 15mbps up. For international surfing, StarHub says the connection is capped at 15mbps down. I’m just happy that it’s better, and that uploads are so significantly better. It’s going to be great for uploading photos to Flickr.

I tried out a couple of moderately-seeded torrents and saw max download speeds of about 4 times higher than I used to get with SingNet. Your mileage may vary, but it’s a promising start. I think a 1.5GB image came down in about 15 minutes.

Posted via email from sangsara’s posterous

Paul Barnes lecture, SMU/Design Society

Paul Barnes design lecture, SMU June 10 2011

Paul Barnes lecture, SMU/Design Society, a set on Flickr.

We attended this on Friday, June 10th. He was on the first stop of a tour that will take him to several Australian cities later this week. Mostly a look at some of his favorite work, from doing logos and type for The Guardian, the National Trust, Kate Moss, Givenchy, and a good deal of insight into how much reiteration and historical knowledge are required for these projects.

→Bringing a Webcomic to the Page: A Chat with Zach Weiner

Zach Weiner, author of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, my favorite *funny* webcomic of all time, on the rise of geek humor:

The less obvious thing is this: we’re all very in tune with machines now in a way I think the last generation wasn’t. For example, when one of my parents doesn’t know something (like, say you pass a statue in the park, but don’t know the person it portrays) they’re okay with being resigned to not knowing. I just pick up my phone and look up wikipedia. I, and many others, use sites like wikipedia, google, and wolframalpha so much that they become like working knowledge. So, for comedians, this opens up possibilities. I can make a joke knowing full well many people will have to look it up. This is okay (within reason) because information is so available.

http://blogs.forbes.com/jasonoberholtzer/2011/05/02/bringing-a-webcomic-to-the-page-a-chat-with-zach-weiner/

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