BAT and BEP in fossil fuel-fired utility and industrial boilers.

I had a chance to review the slides and presentation from the conference “Demonstration of BAT and BEP in fossil fuel-fired utility and industrial boilers in response to the Stockholm Convention on POPs” that was distributed here. It just seems that Thailand is in its early adoption stage of rolling out the standards for industrial boilers and power plants. Dioxins, Dioxin–like compounds (DLC), PCDDs and PCDFs are by product of their effluent.

 

Dioxin is considered very toxic, according to Joe Thornton, "Dioxin's health effects include endocrine disruption, reproductive impairment, infertility, birth defects, lowered sperm counts, impaired neurological development, damage to the kidneys, and metabolic dysfunction...There is no evidence that there is a safe level of dioxin exposure below which none of these effects will occur..."

 

Several key points were delivered in the seminar which I would like to address.

In one of the presentation, the study shows that the max. amount of PCDD/PCDF emitted by wood waste and straws (wheat) exceeds the max. concentration permitted. Therefore, control of combustion of contaminated wood should be limited to incineration plants with efficient emission control systems, not just any ordinary boiler found mostly in factories.

 

Another presentation shows that by year 2030, if no sound environmental energy policy is efficient enough, emissions of dioxins and other pollutants will triple the amount generated now.

Communicating this message to the society to create awareness and action towards a cleaner and safer future is a must. Both direct and non-direct parties involving in boilers operation should take action to prevent emission of these contaminations.

A manifesto for play, for Bulgaria and beyond.

A talk at TED by Steve Keil presented on Jan2011 was really an inspiring episode for those reinventing their workplaces, schools, lives by the "value of play". One of the ideas worth spreading!

SugarCRM to Outlook syncronization

Yesterday I’ve been doing some research including installation and testing features of various SugarCRM to Outlook synchronization with the following requirements and conditions.

Our team uses Outlook 2010 on Windows 7 32 and 64bit. Our SugarCRM is based on the latest SugarCRM CE (now at 6.2)

We wanted a synchronization add-ins for outlook to be able to automatically synchronize contact, emails, task and calendars with SugarCRM.

1.       SugarCRM themselves offered this as called Email Integration: Plug-In for Microsoft Outlook. In a nutshell, this can do the job. But, this feature is offered to any other editions except the Sugar Communication Edition.

2.       Opacus Solutions from UK was also another attempt. The add-ins is called “ Opacus SugarCRM Outlook Plugin”. They offer 2 version, Lite and Pro. In our case, with Outlook2010 and our needs, a pro version and the price tag is USD$20 / year would be the solution. I tested and tried it out and it works absolutely perfect. The only issue I might have is that the support, a lot of issues were left without any replies in their forum page.

3.       Outlander offers Syncs Outlook with SugarCRM. Doesn’t really have the features we need, also the product (released) hasn’t been updated for 3 years? Gave it a try but sort of gave up as the functions given were very limited.

4.       SugarArchiver by JellyBeanSoftware offered the features we wanted. Synchronizing was just an easy one-click button, which you can also configure what to sync and when to sync.  For a onetime payment of AUD$30 this seems like a good deal. Also check their forums and noticed that they software is constantly developing e.g. enhancement requested are even deployed in their next release. However, can’t seem to find their local address in Brisbane in case anyone would like to drop them a bottle of wine.

Try them out and see what works for you! Comments for other add-ins are also welcome.

Lunar Eclipse

mini falls

via flickr.com

MobileMe services no longer available

Coincidentally on the same day, June 6, 2011,  Apple announced the new iCloud together with the termination of MobileMe. If you had an active paid or trial MobileMe subscription as of June 6, 2011, your service will automatically be extended through June 30, 2012, at no additional charge. However, if you choose, you can cancel your subscription at any time for a pro-rated refund. For those that might want to cancel the subscription, below are the steps for backing up and canceling.

How to Backup :

Data that you might be considering backing up are Mails, Contacts, Calendars, iDisk. After reading their detail instructions, it seems Calendars seems to be the most trickiest. Details of how to backup each data sets before cancelation can be found here

How to cancel :

To discontinue the free Find My iPhone service, turn off the application on each ofyour iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch). You can do this by tapping Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > MobileMe > Find My iPhone.

For more information visit

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4597

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2174

Put the right man in the right job

Credit: h20live.exteen.com

See the full gallery on Posterous

Delightful Duties

Duties.pdf Download this file

Reading this and wanted to share. A simple yet excellent teaching of duties.

Custom privacy usage on Facebook

From my early post, “How to create list in facebook”, let’s now make use of that list and see what we can do with it.

Let’s say, I just want to ask my colleagues where should we go this Friday? (excluding the boss!!)

To do this, write your status update as if you normally do (this applies to status, photos, links and video updates as well.)

Click lock icon to left of "Share" button and select “Customize”

Then a "Custom Privacy" box pops up, under the ‘Make this visible to’ part, select “Specific People..” , here you can enter either an individual friend or a list. A suggestion of your friend or list will come up as you type.

Also in this same box, you can also ‘hide this from’. So if your boss was a member in the list earlier, you can add his name here so he doesn’t see this post.

Finally, you might not want to do this every time, select “Make this my default setting” at the very bottom.

Sung-Bong Choi from KGT: Is he the new Susan Boyle?

It’s not that often you come across people that makes you inspired. In 2009, Britain’s Got Talent introduced us to Susan Boyle. Today, Korea’s Got Talent gave Sung-Bong Choi to the world. He sang "Nella Fantasia," and everyone in the audience and judges went crying in tears of happiness similar to what happen in 2009 for Boyle’s performance. Thanks Mr. Choi for bring your talent to the stage, I’m already a fans or yours.

How to create list in Facebook

Someone ask me earlier today how  to create a friend’s list in facebook. Here’s what you’ve got to do to create one.

Case study: Let’s say I have want to create a list of friends that works at my company. So I might want to share thoughts or gossip about the new trainee. First I’ll have to create a friend list:

·         Open your Account drop-down and click “Edit Friends”

·         Click the “+Create a List” button  

·         "Create New List" box pops up

·         In the box, "Enter a Name" for the friend list you're creating e.g. Finance in the same box, type your friends name in  "Start Typing a Name". As you type, FB suggests people you might be thinking to add from your list of friends. Click on one of the suggestions and that person's name will be highlighted blue, with a check mark. Also you can add by clicking on their pictures below.

·         When your happy, click on the "create list" button. The created list should appear on the left hand side menu.

·         FB allows you to rename the list, add more friends to the list, and delete the list. These functions are shown on the list page shown below.

Tomorrow I’ll show you how to keep friends on a friend list from seeing something you post, hence hiding the wall post.

World Environment Day, do people take it serious in Thailand?

June 5 is Environment Day World (WED). Its aims to foster positive environmental action globally.  As an ongoing campaign since 1972 UN aim is to stimulate worldwide awareness of environment and encourages political attention and action.

An event in Thailand points out the need for serious action. A sugar barge sank in Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya district of Ayutthaya on Tuesday, releasing  about 2,300 tonnes of sugar into the river.(Nation)

The sugar has been dissolving and polluting the water. Water quality in the Chao Phraya River section affected by massive amounts of sugar discharged from a sunken barge is expected to return to normal in three days, the Pollution Control Department says. However, PCD officials predicted that the water quality would return to normal by Sunday due to the large amount of water in the river and rainfall.

As a legal action, a law suite is file against the owner (TAN,for kids). The community should be aware and the government should set up authorities to sort out this problem as they do in other countries. PCD’s attitude seems to be that “no big deal, in two days it’ll be to normal”, that’s not good enough, in other countries for example, the EPA take this seriously and take action to prevent the event from happen in the first place. Also, compensation value should be consistent with the ability of the operator to take, the damage caused both direct and indirect. We’ve seen several cases in Thailand that the compensation value was way “under-estimated” for indirect impacts.

Co-Author - Gordon Wood

Updates on recycling campaign

summary.pdf Download this file

Referring to the blog about Recycling Campaign posted earlier, I’ve received updates about the activities done and results from Dr. Sujitra Vassanadumrongdee,   researcher at The Center of Excellence for Environmental and Hazardous Waste Management, Chulalongkorn University this morning.

Over the  period of the project (1 year), a total of 1,769 devices and 2,063 pieces of accessories (chargers and batteries) were collected. With promise to donate 2 US Dollars for every phone drop, Nokia and TES-AMM jointly contributed a donation of 110,000 Thai baht (about US$3,600) to support the university’s environmental fund. All collected phones were sent to TES-AMM for proper recycling. Coincidentally when looking the pictures, the TES-AMM personals running the campaign, Mr Luc Scholte van Mast and  Mr. Thawal Saengsawang were colleagues of mine. What a small world!

How to insert Plus one button ((tag: google, plus one, wordpress, blogger)

Plus one button from Google is launched today.  Currently, there is no official Word Press plugin yet (Neither for other public blogging services).

But don’t worry, you can grab the code from Google and place it on your webpage or blog. Plus, there’s some advance functions that you can play with including Include count, Parse, JS Callback function and URL to +1 (this is for static sites). Details of the API can be found here. That’s it, simple and easy for a single page.

But if you want it on the template, or elsewhere pages on your Word Press site, you need to modify a little bit more. This is done by

So try it out and see if this is really going to beat the “Like” button, although Google stated it wasn’t.

TrueNetTalk is a failure.

Today , I was surfing around for a local VOIP service offering local calls in Thailand. I came across TrueNetTalk and found that their rates are reasonably good for making local calls e.g. 0.16 Baht for land line (from the 300Mins for 50 Baht promotion package). For new subscribers, they offered a try free for 30 minutes to USA, Japan, Singapore, China, Macau, UK, Australia, Taiwan, Malaysia and South Korea to try out the service as well. The service is operated under TRUE Corporation, Thailand’s leading provider of integrated communications solutions and one of the nation’s strongest brands.

Seems like a good deal, so I started filling the online application form, downloaded the software and installed it. Shortly after hitting the submit button, my username and password arrives in my mailbox. I entered them onto the so called “mobile-front-end” of the program. Then I start calling the following numbers to test out the TrueNetTalk application.

Calling	Result
My house	No signal
My friend’s house	No signal
My mobile	No signal
True’s hotline e.g 029008000	No signal
calling toll-free "hotline" numbers e.g. 027777777	No signal

I was a bit disappointed as there seems to be no signal. Maybe because it was just installed and required a reboot? So I rebooted my PC and redialed, still the same. Even if someone claims that “hey, you haven’t refill the account”, I would simply reply, “well, it says try free for 30 minutes right? Also there’s a “hotline” number that you can call for free as well, so it can’t be possible that they all aren’t working just because I didn’t refill right?”.

So for a conclusion, it seems the service doesn’t appear to be in service or working. I strong don’t recommend this software to anyone who is looking for VOIP services in Thailand. More than happy to hear any feedback from successful users of TrueNetTalk.

World Energy Outlook 2010

The 2010 edition of the World Energy Outlook (WEO) was released on 9 November and it provides updated projections of energy demand, production, trade and investment, fuel by fuel and region by region to 2035. It includes, for the first time, a new scenario that anticipates future actions by governments to meet the commitments they have made to tackle climate change and growing energy insecurity.

Source : http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/

key_graphs.pdf Download this file

factsheets.pdf Download this file