Flux

A very interesting game. I played it only once and loved it. Scored 6032 after Level 30 and game over. Try your levels!

from Armor Games
p.s. I removed the plug-in some days after. Click the link to play:)

Your aim is to turn all bubbles into the same colour as the Master bubble in the middle. Drag bubbles to marry same-colour ones. 2 bubbles' combination has the power to change the colour of another unmarried bubble; majority bubbles' combination has the power to change the colour of the minorities. Whatever colour touches the Master bubble, it changes into its colour.

It counts down the seconds. So you should be both quick and skillful.

Well despite that it made me high, I had suddenly thought of something horrible in reality. The process looks like the spread of cancer cells, or mind illnesses. Someone's trying to uniform the style of all. Awweeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Crime Rate of Durham City

Before coming to Durham, I already know that the crime rate of Durham is very low compare to other areas in England and Wales.

I remember when reading I came across a statistics which showed that Durham is one of the top2 safest cities - with the lowest crime rate - in England and Wales. But I forgot the source and couldn't find it on the Internet. The first time I talk with Andy, a psychiatrist part of whose job is to give training to local police officers, we talked about crimes and society. Not surprisingly, he reviewed that each year there are less than 5000 cases of crimes in total, which is 'unbelieveably' low, in my perspective. Plus, NO murder, very low robbery and pick-pockets, very few severe violance crimes. In one sentence, Durham City is generally safe.

Yesterday there delivered a flyer from the City of Durham, the 'Community Safety Partnership' flyer. It arouse my interest again to check out the exact figure of crime statistics. Figure from Office of National Statistics:

Offences	Durham District	N-E Region	England Country
Violence Against the Person	1060	41085	896287
Wounding or Other Act Endangering Life	29	756	13569
Other Wounding	567	20448	410991
Harassment Including Penalty Notices for Disorder	265	9307	214702
Common Assault	133	6871	191362
Robbery	17	1480	82404
Theft from the Person	73	2500	89072
Criminal Damage Including Arson	1466	61977	965995
Burglary in a Dwelling	254	10881	269400
Burglary Other than a Dwelling	455	14054	286875
Theft of a Motor Vehicle	170	7060	160109
Theft from a Motor Vehicle	297	15344	407141

The original page is Here. And I do recommend you to click the 'Map this data' tag right under the 'Key Figures for...' title. You could notice that Durham is among one of the lightest colours. (The lighter the colour, the less crimes reported.)

My own experience is: when walking in the silent street at 9pm, 10pm or sometimes as late as 2am, I am never afraid. It gives me so much sense of safety and peace. I love this expression in the Durham promotion site:

Enjoy the deep peace.

No More Staying up Late!

Finishing my readings, searchings, essays and e-mails, (and each day I do 'em all!!) it is now 3am in the morning...Have promised Ah Wong to go to bed at 2.30am tonight. I breached it again again and again. The coming trimester will be more eventative, and it seems to me that I should maintain a lot of healthy (logically) habits EXCEPT for the bed time. Look this is a dilemma: if I follow those habits I don't have enough hours each day, while if I guarentee my sleeping there won't be enough hours for keeping the habits!

However these habits 'in-the-air' are just brain productions. I'm always thinking in a way more than ideally! Towards the universe and the self, big and small...

Bed time with Radharani Samara's guitar...Wondering whoever could provide me with more of her music? Her performance shows a lot of telent.

How Google Am I?

Though my blogger is opened up just lately, I have been a loyal Google fan for a long while. Google is more than just amazing. To put it simple, Google has put everything you want simple!

The thing I like most about Google is that it does not have anything unnecessary. When things come extra, they are bonuses. Google pages are neat and clear. I can downsize it, downlayer it, downfunction it whenever I don't want it, and keep it the 'least' and the most I need at the same time. 'Customizelism' is the Google philosophy I guess...

While Google is my soft-favourite, Apple is my hard-favourite, as a lot of friends know. The common feature between the two is, yes you get it, 'customizelism'. They both are stylish, while at this point Apple prevails in being cool; are function-rich, while the two cannot compare as they are in different business; and are trendy, needless to explain. Besides all these, they put to the front the previlage to choose our own style, own function and own trend. The annoying thing about Microsoft is that it sells too hard. I don't understand why anyone worries so much when it has a 95%+ market share. Perhaps it is decreasing, but its attitude has brought me an impression of stinginess. In the anti-competition litigation against Microsoft, though sometimes it is arguable that the Tying leaves chances 'of quitting' to customers (which is as rediculous as when IMF says non dominant countries can quit if they are not happy) and it is true when this playable word game is played in front of the judges, I am never convinced that this Tying is beneficial to consumers. Shameless statement.

Windows Live has undertaken a series of 'innovations' lately and generally it is at least a progress. Vista looks better than the previous versions, though it is obviously following the trend set by Macintosh. But the Live products never solve a problem fundamental. They don't care much about their consumers. They believe they are so good that consumers like them for granted. So their features, customized, are add-on's rather than bothway choices. The condition that I am able to customize my product is to accept something unwanted.

I am by no means a 'professional' user. But I am one of the end consumers. There are technologies beyond my knowledge of course, but I know whether I am comfortable with the product or not. This is why I fancy Google. I have not used every item listed in my Google, just a bit. But I think I am very Google already. Trying to list them:

Gmail, Web search, iGoogle, maps & earth, talk, books, scholar, blogger, documents, reader, YouTube, Chrome for a while, translate, and checkout always the Lab for fun, recently the Trends and the Mars (XM misses his hometown).

My homepages of iGoogle:

profile: this is the neatest profile layout ever. of fun, too.

home: i keep a puppy at home ;) he sleeps zZ, runs after my mouse, and rushes to the border (got too excited)!

tag 1: lines of news - google, bbc, China news, etc. and TedTalk.

tag 2: lines of other news - apple, law, etc. and i like the quotes.

tag 3: tools like wiki, currency, maps, amazon, etc. and i want a puppy!

i like the puppy footprint at the bottom of the wallpaper espacially ;)