I am not exactly a tech savvy person. I do not think much of computers and its technical stuff. If my computer hangs, I just press the power button till the computer shut downs and then turn it on again. If my internet connection does not work, I just don't use the internet or just use the Iphone.

But, today I was fiddling with the display settings on my computer for like probably the second time in my life. I realised I did not know the difference between hibernate and standby. In simple English:
A bear hibernates during winter
My job requires me to standby every night.

It does irk me everytime when my computer shutsdown standy? hibernate? after I leave it for a few minutes. But, my life does not depend on the computer. Hence, there was no rush or worries to quickly  wait for the computer to start.

As I was saying... Hibernate vs Standby.... I could not figure out the difference it does to my computer Don't both commands provide a easy and quick way to leave the computer in existing last state and allow us to come back to work on it at exactly the same state later without waiting too long to system to restore itself??? So, I googled and ah hah there is a difference. SLEEP IS AKA STANDBY

Hibernate vs. Standby

Using Standby:

Your machine recovers quickly as your data is stored in RAM. The slower part is waking up the peripherals. Although your machine is in "standby" the power has been cut to items such as your hard drive and monitor. You're running your machine in a very low power mode, but it is still on. This mode can be useful if you're on a notebook and need to conserve your battery while you step away.

Windows Vista has enhanced sleep mode so that on notebook computer, sleeping computer will automatically hibernate when battery power level is low. It also has built-in Hybrid Sleep mode which ensure that system state is preserved when there is power lost.

With Hibernate:

The big difference is that your PC has shut down and is not pulling power. Another difference is that your data is saved to your hard disk and not RAM. This makes it a safer, but slower option for shut down and resume.

Not all PCs have the capability and are configured to Hibernate. If yours is, to see the Hibernate option on your XP shutdown screen, hold down the Shift key when you shut down.

Hibernate, or S4 in ACPI, meanwhile will save the data in physical memory to hard disk drive (HDD), and then power off the computer. In Hibernate mode, a file named hiberfil.sys which has the same file size as the amount of system memory will be created on the local disk. When user wants to use the computer again, the computer will boot up and load back the state at the last hibernation. The advantage of Hibernation mode is that no power is wasted for maximum saving of power. In Hibernation dormancy, no electricity is consumed by system. Beside, restore from Hibernate is generally faster than computer reboot, and is totally different from fresh start, as users can return to the exact state of last hibernation with all programs running and documents opened intact, instead of empty desktop. The disadvantage of Hibernate is that after a period of time, there may have fragmentation of file. Users will need to defragment the volume that stores the hibernation file frequently.

Aurora.. What Next?

A Brighter Day Will Come

This morning I read that President Obama met the families of the Aurora shooting as a "father and husband" as much as a president.  He told them, in a beautiful heart-felt speech, that the whole of the United States stood with them.  He said that "out of darkness a brighter day will come."

He, like it seems every leading politician in the United States (with the notable exception of New York Mayor Bloomberg) did not say a word about gun control.  I cannot help think that the reaction to such shootings, including that of Gabrielle Giffords, is one of a resigned inevitability.  Tornadoes strike the Mid West, hurricanes hit Florida, people are massacred in gun shootings.  It is almost a medieval form of fatalism: like the Black Death these tragedies are sent and people will suffer.

Life, Death, Suffering: all part of human existence

You make think it is distasteful for me to be writing this blog whilst bodies are still lying in the morgue.  I think that the distasteful thing here is the presence of dead bodies in that morgue of people who just wanted a night out in the cinema, not an attempt to look at the issues rather than ducking them.   You may think that this is an American issue and it is only for Americans to comment on and resolve, or not. Your argument undoubtedly has some validity.  However, if you subscribe to it, remind everyone to never comment on issues such as political oppression in China and Burma, people starving in Africa, tidal waves in Sri Lanka, the treatment of Palestinians, or indeed anything that happens outside that artificial construct you call your country.

Talking About the Issues

If I were affected by these shootings, I would not want (just) to hear Obama's dignified words of comfort.  I would want to hear why this happened and what is being done to prevent others from suffering in the future.  How will this "brighter day" come if no one is prepared to talk about the causes, much less actually do something about them?

The above tweet puts rather beautifully my own feelings on the NRA official line that "guns don't kill, people do"  I feel real anger at the suggestion that these are harmless items that are only dangerous when the hands of the mentally imbalanced.  They are designed to kill or injure: that is their simple and only purpose.  Perhaps the US does have deep problems with anger or violence that other high gun ownership countries such as Switzerland and Canada don't.  So what?  Take away the guns, and that anger and violence won't be able to be expressed so easily in such a deadly way.

The Problem Is So Entrenched

What also distresses me is that when gun control is raised (banning or even restricting) you are met with a barrage of "oh that would never work, ownership is so entrenched" arguments.  Is this ever an argument to do nothing?  Was Apartheid so entrenched that it wasn't worth fighting it?  You can produce any number of examples around the world from slavery, to the ending of segregation, to the political situation in Northern Ireland, where you find entrenched positions, powerful vested interests, hugely complex problems, and the requirement for massive political will to change the situation. 

These "it's hopeless even trying" argument can be seen in the contrast between President Obama's total non-dealing with causes and finding solutions, and President Bush's reaction to the 911 attacks.  Yes, you can disagree massively with what was done afterwards, but the complete inaction contrasts markedly with the highly and unrealistically ambitious task of taking on a chunk of the World in a "war on terror".  40 times as many people have died in gun related deaths from September 2001 through to now than did in the 911 attacks.  Where has been the will to do a single thing about it?

11,000 people die annually in the US in gun related deaths; in the UK the figure is less than 50.  Just think about that comparison.  Don't think that Aurora is an isolated event: just click here for the list of 125 killing sprees in the United States between the Columbine massacre and this one compiled by New York magazine.  Aurora is a particularly shocking deadly example, but such killings happen with terrifying, depressing regularity on a smaller scale.

Banning and Restricting Has No Effect

The "no point trying" argument isn't just to be seen in the US.  You hear it here too chanted as a mantra.  It is almost like it has infected the thought of otherwise critical, thinking people in Europe.  Yes, there are millions of guns in circulation in the US.  A total ban tomorrow would not end ownership overnight: how could it?  But guns require maintenance, become out of date, and new ever more deadly models would not be coming on the market.

Efficient Weapon of Murder: Back on Sale in the United States

It is absolutely remarkable that assault weapons were banned by President Clinton in 1994 and that ban was allowed to lapse in 2004.  It has not been renewed.  If I wanted a joint in England I wouldn't have a clue where to go.  Dope is available, yes, of course - but it is not as easy to come by as walking into a café in Amsterdam where it is freely on offer.  You are not thinking it through terribly well if you suggest that by banning or making sales harder you would not have any effect on ownership: of course you will.  It does not take a rocket scientist to see that the tighter the restriction, the potentially greater the effect.  Yes, Norway happened.  Where there is a enough determination there is a way, but the vast majority of such potential incidents will without doubt have been stopped by a ban on sales and ownership.  That is very simply borne out by World statistics on gun deaths. 

All sorts of other arguments are banded around too: it's not easy to change the Constitution.  Well, it wasn't easy to end segregation. It's election year.  Yes, that didn't stop the President's highly risky statement on same-sex marriage.  This is about mental health not gun control.  No; take away the assault rifle and someone with these issues cannot just go and massacre people this easily.

Why The Lack of Will?

I am left with a sense of incredible despondency in this.  It is almost as though there is no will to change things, even on the liberal left.  Is there some unspoken emotion we are not aware of?  Is it because even these people actually believe that the occasional massacre is worth it so that people can have weapons to protect themselves from the "underclass"?

A staggering 100 people have died since Aurora in gun related deaths in the US: most will be poor, deprived.  One American friend bluntly told me that many people see it as a form of "natural" population control.  It's only when white middle class people get killed at schools, shopping malls or cinemas that it even makes the headlines.  Is that the reason people don't seem to care?

The One Certainty

The only certainty about a difficult, complex situation is that if you do not even try to resolve it, and worse won't even talk about doing so, it will remain.  Hope or blind faith will not "make a brighter day come" as the people of the Middle Ages believed.  Bold, strong, political action just might.  It is certainly worth a go.  Without it we will be hearing the same speech President Obama did today in five years, in fifteen years, in fifty years time.

Rest in peace, victims of Aurora.

Draw Something

If you follow me on Twitter you'll know I love playing a game called "Draw Something".  I used to see people mentioning it and didn't have a clue what everyone was going on about.  This is a quick explanation plus an opportunity to stop clogging up your timelines with my "art work" by creating a little gallery of some of my favourite drawings.

The Game

The game is played on either an iPhone/iPad or an Android.  It's downloadable as a free app (with mildly annoying adverts) or you splash out the heady sum of two squid to get the ad free version.  It's possible to try it out for free first and upgrade without losing all your games.

Basically it's like Pictionary (remember that?) but on a phone, with colours, and with no time limit.  You get a choice of 3 words and play against a single partner.  You can find them on Facebook, by email or by asking a friend for their username.  It's possible to play random strangers, but there are enough people on Twitter you talk to who will play it, and it's much more fun with an opponent you know.

You take turns; one person draws and the other guesses.  You have a selection of letters when you're guessing and know the number of letters in the word.  Therefore if you can do anagrams well it almost doesn't matter how bad the drawing is.  The words are graded for difficulty: one coin ones are really simple (e.g. wink, or tree) and three coin ones can be as tricky as "hawk eye" or concepts like "insomnia".

You have to watch out for American spellings and words: terms come up I haven't even actually heard of on occasion.  You can guess whilst the picture is being drawn or wait until the end.  You get to watch a playback of what your opponent did when guessing if you want to, or can skip that bit.

Go Team Peter and Team Anya!

By guessing correctly you win coins which you can exchange for extra colours (which makes it much more fun) and "bombs" (used to remove letters when you're guessing, to select new words to draw, or to choose from special categories that have words worth up to nine coins).  You do running wins - I'm currently up to 320 unbroken correct drawings with my indefatigable and brilliant pal Anya Palmer.

Popularity and Why I Love It

DrawSomething was a "phenomenon" when it was launched.  Within 5 weeks of launching it had been downloaded 20 million times.  50 days on and it had achieved 50 million downloads.

In April 2012 it was sold to the games giant Zynga for $180 million... and immediately caused Zynga's stock price to drop by 50%.  It seems many people had initially downloaded it, tried it out, got bored of the novelty, and left in their droves.

I however still *really* love it - and judging by the fact that I have over 30 games on the go at the moment with people from Twitter, I'm not the only one.  If you are only drawing stick men in monochrome it will become dull very quickly, it is true.  If you have fun with it, be a bit silly, and make your drawings pretty, it can be a brilliant distraction.

You can come back to a game whenever you like, so it's a great way of having a distraction for 5 minutes in the middle of the day.  Go away for 2 weeks on holiday?  No problem, you just pick up where you left off.

Gallery

Anyway, enough about the game: the real purpose of this is to show off some of my TOTALLY kick-ass drawings.  I spend up to about 5 minutes on some of them and really enjoy doing all the detailing.  I can't draw for crap with a pen and paper and am therefore amazed how these turn out with just my finger tip on a screen.  You can select 4 sizes of "pen" and that's how you get the detail.  I always draw the background first, then the actual thing I want my opponent/partner to guess.

There is also an excellent website I recommend called Crap Draw Something: just visit this link and/ or follow @crapdraw on Twitter.

"CUTE"

 

"CLEVER"

"HOMOSEXUAL"

"SHAMELESSLY BRILLIANT"

"FUNNY"

"GROSS"

"A BIT SHIT"

And that (fairly horrendous attempt at a werewolf) concludes the highlights of my Draw Something career to date. Hope you've enjoyed :D

.....

In reality, loving money, playing some tricks, or lying are not that big of a deal.

The biggest mistake a woman would make is to be with a man she doesnt love.

Marriage is a long journey. Even if you can achieve something in the future, you will be the one that gets hurt in the end.

Twitter Love

I've recently started dating someone from Twitter.  On this day seven weeks ago I was waiting at Ely Railway Station to meet him for the first time.  Ely is quite a scary place at the best of the times, located as it is in on the edge of the Fens.  Forget for a moment its magnificent cathedral and let's concentrate instead on the names that the people of that mysterious watery expanse that stretches up from Cambridgeshire into Lincolnshire even give themselves: potato heads and yellow bellies.  Think of a medieval Low Countries painting of ruddy faced peasants who had been at the ale and mead, add webbed feet, and we've got a reasonably accurate depiction of the scene in the station.  As I have tweeted before, the Fens give me the willies - and not in a good way, either.

Ely Station, 13 May 2012

Into this strange setting stepped a very handsome, strapping young man that I'd been following for about 6 months on Twitter.  We had had conversations by @ messages, followed by DM (direct message officially, but also known as "Do Me" or the dark room of Twitter, by some...)  We had moved on to swapping mobile phone numbers, progressed from texts to Whatsapp direct messaging, Skype video linked, and finally actually spoken by mobile.  This is the modern day progression: a strict set of electronic etiquette that is as rigidly adhered to as any set of rules the Habsburgs might have dreamed up in the 18th century for how one behaved at court.

We had a very good idea of who the other guy was.  Nonetheless, was this all a bit weird?  We'd arranged to spend 5 days together.  I'd been terribly grown up and responsible, emailing a copy of my driving licence over with my address on it, insisting he leave it with a friend, to hopefully allay his fears I wasn't some random axe-murderer and he might never be seen again [this no doubt had completely the opposite effect and totally put him on edge. Oh well, seemed a sensible idea at the time].  We knew we got on as friends: we both said, well if we don't fancy each other we'll just get drunk every day and have a laugh.  Yet STILL: this was a blind date to a large extent.

Twitter As A Place To Find "Someone"

Or was it?  Is Twitter in fact an excellent place to find a special someone?  When I think about personal ads in newspapers, I'm aware that the information available is so incredibly limited that you really might as well go up to a random stranger in a bar.   Yes, you may get some information about interests and to some extent the "type" of person is narrowed down if they are advertising somewhere like Guardian Soulmates.  Then there are "dating sites" for gay men such as Gaydar and Grindr.  There is no question that whatever they pretend, the incredibly strong subtext is about meeting for sex.  You create an image that you would like to project of yourself and the "selection" that goes on is 90% about the photos you swap, ignoring how out of date, flattering or outright misleading they might be.  I know guys who have met through Grindr and it has led to happy relationships, but for me there is little question what the motivation is for the vast bulk of people who use the app.

With Twitter, on the other hand, you have something quite unique.  Of course everyone projects to some extent a personality that they would like others to have of them.  Some people in fact manage to project an entirely fake personality and thousands fall for it.... click here for the weird and wonderful story of Lord Credo if you aren't familiar with it.

Real or Fake? Twitter -generally- does the job

However, in the vast majority of cases, it is very difficult to not be yourself if you are a regular user of Twitter.  You don't just post things that you want people to read: you get caught up in conversations and interactions that can be very rapid and spontaneous.  Unlike a medium where there is just one-on-one interaction (e.g. Grindr) you get a far better picture of someone's true personality through these conversations.  It's a bit like someone taking you out to dinner and being utterly charming to you, but then behaving like a total shit to the waiter.  They might be making an effort with you right now, no doubt because they want to get in your pants, but seeing them behave like that to someone else should ring alarm bells.  You will likely be on the receiving end of that at some point.

With Twitter, is possible for anyone to look at your timeline and to see how anyone is with other people.  This is both with strangers and with people that you know as well, because the social networking element of the site of course means that you will often have mutual Twitter friends.  If they are talking crap there will always be someone who will see it and call them out on it.  It is a very public medium and one in which it is quite hard to maintain a fake persona unless you are absolutely determined to and put an awful lot of effort into it.

Lots of people on Twitter also blog.  Whilst this is again, to a large extent, something that is "controlled" and puts out a personality you would like to project about yourself, it can still tell you loads about a person.  If, like me, you are very open about your feelings and things that have happened in your life, a reader can in the space of an afternoon find out a mass of information on you that gives a depth to your personality and character that will not come out in a personal ad or even through going on several dates.

The last important thing is of course that Twitter is not a dating site.  It represents a wide range of things to different people, but 99.9% it does not exist to hook up with people.  People on there are not out to find a date or a partner: it is a place to be more generally sociable, to exchange views, to access information or to goof about.  This for me actually makes it a far more likely place that you will meet someone special if you are "on the market" to do so.  Introductions through friends and general social interaction always struck me as by far the best place to meet, than a place where people specifically go to hope to "find love".  I know people very successfully meet in such other places, but for me there is something in the old cliché that it happens when you are not looking for it.

Back to The Handsome Strapping Young Man

And so we return to Ely.  Ste (for that is the said young man's name) stepped off the train and true to form gave me a huge hug.  If you read his blog you'll know he does this to people he knows, random strangers, and indeed random inanimate objects, on occasion.  Just like the other 100+ people I have met socially off Twitter, he was pretty much exactly as I imagined him to be, from talking to him and observing his Twitter persona and interactions.

Baking in MY kitchen. This is pretty bizarre.

In the past 7 weeks, despite my being abroad for 3 weeks, and his living on the other side of the country, we have somehow managed to spend a total of 17 days together.  I've just dropped him off at the station again and can't wait to see him again.  He is clever, funny (he "lmfaooooos" every 2 minutes) and has the biggest warmest heart imaginable.  He is loving, he is wise beyond his years, and he is gloriously ditsy.  I really respect what he has to say and find it so easy to talk to him for hours.  He sings, he acts, he paints, he sculpts, and he speaks French and Chinese.

HE ALSO COOKS.  If you follow me and know the abominations I serve up in my kitchen, you will understand the level of amazement I have at having had a delicious 3-course vegetarian meal cooked for me last night by him.   Most importantly, he is a dog person and my stand-offish, snooty collie @LassieOscar is already rather fond of him and gives him cuddles. "Ste from Twitter" has a magnetic personality and is quite exceptional.  I'm still a bit amazed he's in my life, and not just on Twitter.  In a nutshell.... I beam from ear to ear when I think of him.

Thank you Twitter

I love Twitter for many things.  It has enriched my life on so many fronts: provided friends, entertainment, support, information, contact to some remarkable people and many a laugh.  I really did not expect it to provide me with this though.  This blog is for you: thank you Twitter x

Wild boars

After a late night supper, my parents and I were heading home when we saw wildboars on our street!

The first wildboar i saw was rummaging trough a garbage bin of one of the houses. He was licking from an Ayam Brand can.

When we drove further up the road, we saw FIVE more wildboars!! It looked like someone has been feeding them daily. Four years ago when the major landslide happened nearby, I only saw two wildboars roaming the street. But now, there are six of them!!! They are not even afraid of humans or cars....

City wildboars ;)