Flood of Pictures: Paris

I have finally finished my oncalls, but currently I'm too tired to even press the keys on my keyboard. So here are as usual, a flood of photos from the recent trip to Paris.

Flight to Paris: We left from home really early in the morning at 5a.m. Poor kids, here Amar is seen flat asleep, PMS also looks slightly dazed yet Sarah was busy digesting her newly bought magazines. The guy sitting in front of PMS was praying we'd reach the destination alive (I guess). The flight was very cheap: a total of 74 pounds for all four of us. Flight to Paris took 1 hour from Coventry.

Upon arrival we were reminded that the time in Paris is one hour ahead of England. We reached Paris early morning, while the sun was still casting golden light. We were darn excited upon touchdown, finally Paris!

We took a 20 minute drive on taxi to our hotel. It costed around 30 euros. However, taking a train would cost around the same for all 4 of us and weigh in the inconvenience of our huge luggage and semi-sleeping children travel by taxi was definitely the better option. Surprisingly our taxi driver was genuine, helpful and genuinely helpful. Coming from a local, we had learnt during the 20 minute drive more than what we read for hours in the Paris Guidebook (the book was also excellent). During the journey, our kind taxi driver was showing us all the beautiful landmarks (including the famous Guillotine - unfortunately not pictured), explained how to get around and advised us to invest 14 euros for the three day "metro pass". For around 14 euros we were able to travel unlimited on the underground trains and busses to all destinations within zones 1-2 in Paris. Excellent.

We found out why the taxi driver was so kind and helpful: he was from Malaysia.

Checking in: This is a view of the lobby of our hotel room. The hotel rates were relatively cheap so we really didn't know what to expect for the money. We were pleasantly surprised that the hotel owner was quite friendly and helpful. We were even more surprised to see our room:

... pleasantly surprised that is. The room was better than we imagined. It was huge and had more than enough space for the 4 of us, fully en-suite, had a TV, air-conditioning (all pictured above) and had an excellent view of the Gare du Nord:

View from our hotel window; Gare du Nord: We (rather, PMS) chose quite a strategic place to stay. Our hotel was just opposite this famous train station, famous to UK travellers that is. Gare du Nord is easily reachable from Orly Airport and had direct underground veins to major attractions including Disneyland, Eiffel Tower, and the Basilisque Sacre Coeur. My deepest regret about the recent Paris visit was not being able to visit the beautiful, white, mosque-like cathedral despite it being only 3 stops from our hotel! (In comparison, the Eiffel Tower is like 15 stops away). Click the links and see for yourself.

Much to our relief and delight, there were at least 3 (I bet there were much more) Halal shops in Gare du Nord. Above was one, only several doors away from our hotel. Food wasn't a problem at all.

After spending much of the day recovering we went out together to Point Neuf for the night boat tour of the river Seine, and above was PMS in front of the Eiffel Tower at night (taken using the "night portrait" mode on the camera.

The next day, with barely time to recover from the night before, we were again resuming our tour. Above was taken just near the Louvre. Eiffel tower in the background.

That's all folks!

PS

1. Right now in the UK, we have begun what is called the "daylight saving time". This is the time when we very curiously put our clocks one hour ahead of normal. The rationale, as the name suggest, is so that we savour the daylight for longer than possible if time was "normal".
   
2. Daylight saving time starts at 2am on the last Sunday in October. Confused? My early years in the UK, I really had trouble adjusting to the daylight saving time. There were instances when I came to lectures one hour late, not knowing that time has changed to daylight saving. Those were extremely embarrassing moments.
3. The reason why we need to enter daylight saving time to begin with, is because the day is so short nowadays in the UK. Daylight begins at around 7am, and ends at 5pm.
   
4. Imagine coming back from work in total darkness at 5pm! 5pm in Malaysia is when the children starts playing football outside, enjoying the sun.
5. That is why many people in the UK are affected by what is called Seasonal Affective Disorder, which in English simply means "depression especially in Winter due to not having enough sunlight :p"
   
6. For me though, I love these times. I love coming back home when it's dark. There is a nostalgic, magical feeling that I could not properly explain :)

PPS

1. Firefox 2 has just been released. Make sure you guys download it ASAP; many improvements from Firefox 1.5.
2. Picasa 2 also has ALOOOOT of improvements in their latest update. Make sure you guys do the update.
   
3. One of the best features I love in Picasa 2 is the Web Album integration. If you guys love photos, do give Google Web Album a try - it's excellent. I've already uploaded lots of pictures, but for the moment I'll keep the address a secret - it's for PMS' and yours truly's parents & family only, so far.
4. Fuh!
   

Cutting Edge Fashion

Picture: Style.com

Fashion designer Hussein Chalayan showed to the world the absolute bleeding, cutting edge of fashion at his Spring/Summer 2007 Fashion Show.

For the show Chalayan used animatronics technology to "morph" clothes from one fashion to another. Concept art:

Long dresses morphs to short miniskirts, dresses transforms into hats, automatic zippers and many more.

1. Watch the video, and prepare to be utterly gobsmacked impressed: Full length video [nudity warning]. The animatronics part comes towards the middle to end of the video so please be patient.
   
2. Behind the scenes. Link.
3. Photos

Seriously, the technology is absolutely AMAZING and the video is not to be missed. I look forward to buying shirts that button themselves, a jacket that could transform into a t-shirt, a cap that could morph into a pair of sports shoes and wearing the same shirt for a week (the shirt would change fashion every day).

Cool -- via boing boing and Engadget.

Interesting (to me) Links

Firstly, I'd like to apologise to readers who finds stuff like this boring. Okay, on with the post ...

1. I found a great link to Mathematical Jokes on Wikipedia. There are many on the page, but here's an excerpt:

One such example is calculator spelling, words and phrases formed by entering a number and turning the calculator upside down. Due to their crudeness and relative simplicity (requiring only basic calculator skills to achieve), they are usually spread by schoolchildren. Often the words are accompanied by stories involving numbers that lead to the "final solution".

Example:

Christina Aguilera's breasts weigh 69 pounds (enter 69 into calculator), which is too, too, too much (enter 222, making 69222). So she went to 5th Street (enter 5, making 692225) to see her #1 doctor (enter 1, making 6922251) Dr. X (push the multiply button). After 8 surgeries (enter 8 then equals, giving 55378008) she was (turn the calculator upside down to reveal the calculator word) BOOBLESS.

--sorry about that one--

Most of the other jokes on the page are actually quite intelligent. Do visit the page and have a laugh would you?

2. If you are tech inclined or even if you're not, this is a great website to bookmark as your homepage: http://popurls.com/. On the page are actually numerous links to breaking news of the day from various websites. The news varies from tech, global/world, entertainment and anything really collected from prestigious websites like googlenews, yahoonews, del.icio.us, digg and many more. Apart from news, what I really like is that the page also has a webcomic updated daily, interesting pictures on Flickr as well as videos of the day from youtube (among others). It really is an excellent one-stop page to all your favourite pages/news on the web. Do give it a go.

And lastly,

3. In my opinion the best, it's called Webaroo. Webaroo is a free 7mb utility you could download for free from http://www.webaroo.com/. What it could do is SAVE WEBSITES (including links of several depths) onto your computer for viewing offline. Not only that, the saved webpages are then searchable AND sync-able to your laptop, smartphone or PDA.

This would be an excellent solution for me when I'm staying away from home during oncalls (without internet access) or when I'm, for example, stuck in a caravan by the beach in Scotland. Cool eh?

I've moved to Blogger Beta

I'm finally done with my week long oncall! Argh, thank goodness for that. However, I have to say I did have fun, and had both in terms of learning from seeing new things and practising on practical procedures (this time I got to do a lumbar puncture, pleural aspirate, an ascitic drain and my favourite: a central line). I LOVE doing practical procedures.

Apologies dear readers, my blog is in abit of a mess at the moment. The picture in the header is gone, and everything is all over the place. The reason for the clutter is simple:

I've upgraded to blogger in beta - *Insert evil sounding laughter here*

Errr, so what does that mean? Blogger in beta offer many new and exciting cutting edge features that are not available in the previous Blogger. For example:

1. I can now tag my posts into various categories just like in Wordpress. (Blogger confusingly calls this feature "Labels")
2. We now have the option to limit people who could view the blog e.g. everyone or invite only
3. The templates are FAAAR more customisable, and easily so as well. Elements in a template is just a drag and drop away. Very cool.

Having said all that, I've lost many things from my previous blog as well: the page counter is gone (NOOOOOOO!) and so has the header picture.

However, it'd be a chance for me to design a new header for itchiness *Insert Evil Laughter* <- (yup, I'm an optimist). It may take me a while to get used to this new Blogger Beta, unfortunately that may not happen this long bank holiday weekend. This bank holiday weekend, we have plans with Uncle and Auntie De's family for an excursion. One that has been in planning for many weeks, and one that I have been gleefully anticipating throughout my loooooong oncall week.

Okay my friends, hopefully I'd be able to work well with Blogger Beta, but until then, expect this blog to stay in a semi-messy state. Many apologies.

Yours sincerely
~M

PS
Dyanna - Muahahahaha.