Selamat Hari Raya!

To my dear family and friends

SELAMAT

HARI RAYA

AIDILFITRI

MAAF ZAHIR

& BATIN

and don’t forget the food

I Even Eat It Hard

Do you ever browse your blog’s statistics? See top post clicks, referrers, top categories, blog hits etc? If you do, either you are very concern about your readers, or you’re being narcissistic. Heh.

Narcissus (Greek:Νάρκισσος) – a hero from Greek mythology

So, my narcissus side urged me to see M.C.B.O.D.C.K’s blog stats. For some unknown reason my top post is still “Wahai Sup Sayur!” and it has been months. Yesterday’s referrers includes Google Translate, on “Wahai Sup Sayur!”.

I clicked on the link, and it translates the page from Bahasa Malaysia to English. Here comes the funny bit~

Voila! O Vegetable soup! Since the post was half-malay-half-english, everything becomes so rojak + ABC.

“Even nak makan pun susah” —> “I Even Eat It Hard”

A Man’s Adventure, Part 1

This pic was taken when heavy snow struck all over London and across UK. This is where I stayed for the past 9 months. Since it’s one of Imperial College London’s Halls of Residence, I paid less than the actual market value for that kind of accommodation. On the other side, it’s 20-40 mins journey by bus to the main campus at South Kensington, or if you prefer a much cost-saving option, it’s just 25mins walking distance *London’s walking pace*.

30 St Mary Axe. Nicely shaped skyscraper located at the main financial district, the City of London. There was no intention to visit the place at all, it’s a side benefit when I read my map wrongly. LOL

The melting snow marks the end of a celebration. This pic was taken at Hyde Park, 3 days after the heavy snow. IC was closed for two days due to safety reasons and transportation problems. Tube, buses, and all means of public transports were suspended as well so we walked out from Wilson House to Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens – to enjoy our last fluffy moment!

Mile End Road taken on Green Bridge, Mile End Park, London Borough of Tower Hamlets. A small yet beautiful park. There was a day when I felt so stressed, I sat in a bus until the end of the bus route. Such a random act, and the bus took me here. Managed to calm myself and guess what, I made a lasagna when I went home.

London Central Mosque, near Regents Park. A shot after Friday prayer in March 2009. I occasionally went here to perform Friday prayer, IC’s prayer hall or Salahuddin Trust is a much closer option. But here is much comfortable place and there’s some cheap halal food stall here as well!

Old Royal Naval College building, The University of Greenwich. This picture was taken from Royal Observatory, Greenwich. I’m suggesting anyone visiting London to go to this place since the scenery outstands others in London.  Too much exaggeration? Well, I’m expecting those Greenwich people to treat me Nasi Ayam later~haha

Lunchtime Concert at IC Business School lobby entrance (Tanaka Building), performed by ICSO. I wish I could be one of them! But I think one needs to take ABRSM or something equivalent to join this symphony orchestra team. Still, there are IC Wind Band, IC Big Band and others, which requires no prior qualification- just purely human talent!

Size Does Matters

I would assume that most people won’t notice they are not getting the maximum out of nearly everything. Simplest example – MP3 songs. MP3 is a lossy audio format, it compresses up to 80% from the original source file, particularly from audio CDs. But are you hearing silent loops when playing your MP3 songs? Unless it’s a corrupted file, you won’t notice any difference at all.  Still, people invented other types of audio container formats that implemented lossless compression method. Somehow “lossless compression”  sounds a bit awkward, at least for me. One of the file format – FLAC – stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec – really grabbed my interest. It won by being the most versatile and flexible and widely available format.  I’ve been downloading few songs albums hoping to hear the mere difference between lossless and lossy audio. Note that they’re not typical 128kbps mp3s, they’re high quality 256kbps ripped from audio CD. So, it’s a battle between FLAC audio files vs high quality MP3 songs.

Here’s the question. Is there any difference between both files? The answer is yes, although it was just a slight distortion which could only be heard using my Sennheiser earbuds (not a chance using my laptop’s speaker!). But then there comes an issue – are the songs ripped correctly? I mean, of course it stated 256kbps, but I used to get a 320kbps songs with truncated audio waveforms. So, the bit rate can’t really reflect the whole quality of the files.

Since the quality isn’t differ that much, we shall see another important aspect – the capacity. A 6.03 mins track will cost your harddisk:

MP3 : 8.33MB

FLAC : 38.95MB

That is not a pleasant fact at all.  Those FLAC files eat up your storage nearly 4 times bigger than a normal MP3 do. So, why care about lossless? Well, from my personal point of view, the fact that i’m listening to a nice lossless audio files, be it Bach’s or Matthew Bellamy’s, it satisfies me enough. It’s like the “Wow, I own a Vaio although the specs are far less better than an HP!” feeling, if you know what I mean. Currently I’m not switching all my MP3 songs to FLAC, just only few albums from my favourite British band. Why? Because size does matter! Yeah, until I get myself a 1.5TB of external storage.

The developer – Xiph.Org Foundation

Though, I have to admit that I’m being unfair for not revealing the whole features of FLAC – it’s multichannel support, encode/decode time etc. I would suggest that you experience it yourselves. Try to get some files to your hard drive, blast  it on your 5.1ch Harman/Kardon. Perhaps you can hear some more significant difference.

Quack!

i’m still here !

-= this blog shall be updated really soon =-