Life must be lived forwards

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

- Soren Aabye Kierkegaard , 19th century Danish philosopher

Blue screen on starting up Windows Vista

I was having blue screen problem with my notebook last night. Everytime the system try to start up Windows Vista, it shows the infamous blue screen. Starting up again in safe mode is ok.

Tried many things to rectify the problem:
1) Remove all the fixes applied just the day before
2) Restore to previous restore point
3) Use the last known best configuration
4) F8, and then go to Repair the system
5) Uninstall the most recently installed programs
6) Taken out the battery and run on A/C

All did not help!

Finally I managed to capture the filename 'acpidisk.sys' on the blue screen. After some searches found that this file is a trojan horse. I renamed the file, and start the system again. And instantly the Windows Vista started up normally. I then proceeded to delete the file from my system. It's located at C:\Windows\System32\Drivers folder.

After that I run my antivirus & anti-spam program for the whole system for a cleanup. So far so good.

Point to be taken:
Take out the 'Automatically restart under the System failure' option from system properties so that you have time to look at the messages display on the BLUE SCREEN.

A visiting trip to a village in China - April 2008

The new Beijing Capital Airport


Travel to Hebei on a raniny day


Arriving at the village

After a good night's rest, visiting one of the village

Having a typical lunch at one of the villager's home

Variety of fruits selling at the town center

Morning market place

Hair saloon and service for ear piercing

The Nine Dragon Poplar

Village dancing group

Gai-Dao-Rou

Pumpkin buns

On the way to airport heading home, passing by the Beijing National Stadium - Bird's Nest

The National Swimming Center - Water Cube

Watermarking your photographs

I was looking for tools to watermark the photos that I have taken. Downloaded and tested a few of the free tools.

Finally I settled with the following two:

1) Unidream's Powerbatch http://www.unidreamtech.com/

2) Faststone Photo Resizer http://faststone.org/FSResizerDetail.htm
Both I found to be quite easy to use, and flexible to adding watermarks. And they are free for home users.

Faststone Capture - screen capture program

This is one of the shareware program which I use very often for capturing screens and make changes such as resize, save in different format, rotate the capture graphics etc.

Anyone interested can find it at:
http://faststone.org/

Free pdf creation tool

One of the favorite tool I used for creating pdf file is pdf955.
It's a free tool and available at:
http://www.pdf955.com/

WikiMapia - web based map

Recently discovered a very useful site which provides very good source of information for searching places, and the map are marked with names.

Those who used Google Earth before would noticed that both uses the same satellite images. But they are different programs and I tend to like the way places are maked and named in Wikimapia. Plus Wikimapia is web based so without installing any program I can access the information just by using my browser to reach the site.

From the Wikimapia faq:

About WikiMapia

WikiMapia is a Web 2.0 project to describe the whole planet Earth. It was created by Alexandre Koriakine and Evgeniy Saveliev, inspired by Google maps and Wikipedia.

Try it at: http://www.wikimapia.org/

Time zone & world clock

Ever get confused with the different time zones you need to deal with?
How to find a suitable time to communicate with your counterpart on other parts of the globe?

Try checking the following two sites for time, clock, time zone information.
They have served me well, and hope they are useful for you too:

http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/
http://www.timeanddate.com/

Document converting tool - Print2eDoc

Another great program for converting your office documents to pdf, or jpg, bmp, etc file formats.

The program is free for personal use, but you need to register so that you don't get the the line of message printed across the top of the page. And of course if you pay for the Pro version, there are more enahnced features, should you need them.

Great tools! give it a try at:
http://gnostice.com/index.asp

Mutianyu Great Wall, China - April 2007

Mongolia: June 2007

Not much traffic on the road , and only sparsely located gers.

We pass by some chalets in various colors (still under constructions) and from far it doesn't seem real ...

(stone site with flags)

An ovoo (Mongolian: овоо, heap) is a type of shamanistic rock cairn found in Mongolia. Ovoos are often found at the top of mountains and high places and at borders and cross-roads. They serve as both navigational aids in a country with few roads and fewer signs, and religious sites, used in worship of the mountains and the sky as well as in Buddhist ceremonies.

[Notes from Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovoo ]

Bare hills, Clear water, green trees

Camels

the bare hills and the flat land

Visited a herder family and tasted some food stuff such as milk cream, yogurt, lamb soup, etc

Herder family