Rock Throwers on C-5

I've been hearing lots of horror stories about rock-throwers and road-spikers along C-5 in Makati and Taguig over the past half-decade or more. Some of the stories I've heard include: spiking the road with nails so that passing cars get their tires flattened; putting a large wooden beam in the middle of the road so that fast-moving cars dent their wheels and blow their tires; throwing rocks at passing cars; pretending to get hit by cars that pass by;

And the most creepy (and perhaps an urban legend): dropping a dead body onto a car from an overpass, then in connivance with some corrupt cops, claiming that the driver of the car hit and killed someone, and shaking lots of money out of the driver.

In the first case (tire-spiking, wooden beam, or rock-throwing) the motivation of the criminals and drug addicts behind these scams is to get the driver of the car to stop. Then they would converge on the car and robbery (at best) to murder (at worst) would probably happen.

Anyway, last night Lalai was coming home from the office (Saturday). And some men tried to flag her down, and when she didn't stop they threw what seems to me (from examining the damage) to be a chunk of concrete hollow block at her windshield. It missed, but impacted the rear passenger door arch.





Good thing Lalai had listened to all the C-5 horror stories I've told her over the years, because she told me she wanted to stop and look at the damage but remembered what I'd said.

Anyway, the dent is small but deep, and it's right at the crease of the metal so it cannot be repaired by paintless dent repair: a proper repair would have to remove the surrounding paint, apply automotive body filler, and repaint the area. Which will cost a lot of money and take a week. Conceivably, I could claim it on our insurance but we'll still pay the deductible and have no car for a week. I have to decide by tomorrow whether I'll make the insurance claim because the car's current insurance runs out on Friday.

My other option is to not have it repaired; it is unsightly but can be lived with. The paint was stripped down to the metal though, so I'd have to put some epoxy primer or something on the exposed metal to avoid corrosion. And if I do that, it will probably look ugly. So I ought to have it repaired, cough up the deductible, and also have the old car re-registered and repaired so we're not without a car.

It's things like these which completely piss me off about our rotten miserable country. And things are bound to get worse what with the skyrocketing price of fuel and rice. There may be riots in the streets before long, but even if not, petty and not-so-petty crime will certainly increase.

Building a Better Barndoor, Part II

I glued the motor/gearbox board to the front of the existing barndoor mount (after removing the stepper motor and stepper motor control board).



Unfortunately, after re-testing, I found that the motor turns at around 1.28 RPM (45 - 47 seconds per rotation) using a 1.5V AA battery and a 1N5401 diode for dropping the voltage (the 1N4148 blew up, not beefy enough).

I was able to get another bolt, with around 33 TPI (threads per inch), as compared to the old bolt which had 20 TPI.



At 1 RPM and 20 TPI, the linear movement is 0.05 inches per minute. At 1.28 RPM and 33 TPI, linear movement is 0.039 inches per minute. There's quite a bit of error, but I'll see if the tracking is good enough for 30-second exposures.

I've verified that even with a worse-case load (200mm lens pointed directly over the motor drive), there is no slipping.



I also purchased a Slik Mini-Pro III tripod (with ball-head) for 1,100 pesos at Camerahaus. The 400-peso mini-tripod from KL didn't have enough holding torque on its tiny little ball. With a "real" ball head, things are much more secure.



Now the proof is in the photography.

Building a Better Barndoor

I've been working on my shelved barndoor drive for astrophotography. By lightening the upper wooden part and using a ball head, I've actually gotten the darn thing to track the sky.

It's been cloudy these past few days due to Tropical Depression Ambo, but I got some photos last Sunday. This is a 100% crop of Mizar and Alcor, the famous naked-eye double star in the crook of the Big Dipper:



and here's how it should look like (from a planetarium program):



You can even see the Tycho catalog star in the photo from the Pentax! not to mention, Mizar (the brighter, and hence larger star) is also a double. The photo either hints at the companion, or my barndoor was just vibrating a lot and produced that protrusion at 7 o'clock on Mizar.

It's a 30-second exposure at ISO 100 (forgot to change the ISO after taking some flats) using a 135mm Pentax Auto-Takumar. Not bad! it's obvious, that Mizar and Alcor did not trail. True, they are not round, but this is at 100% zoom. At sane viewing resolutions, they are definitely round.

The problem with the floppy drive stepper motor I'm using in my barndoor is that, it has extremely feeble torque. As a result, half the time it doesn't turn properly and so I get star trails. So the barndoor only works half the time, which is pretty annoying!

But I've hit on a solution. I bought two of these:



It's a "3-speed crank axle gearbox set" made by Tamiya for small RC cars, catalog number 70093. It's very popular with the robotics set because it's fairly cheap ($5, but I got mine in Park Square 1 for 258 pesos, or almost $7 each). The gearbox can be built in a high-speed (16.6:1), medium-speed (58.2:1), and low-speed (203.7:1) gear ratio.

The small hobby motor that comes with the gearbox set is a Mabuchi FA-130, a 1.5V unit that can take up to 4.5V (I drove it from 12V for a while).

I built one gearbox with the 203.7:1 gear ratio..



and the other one with the 16.6:1 gear ratio..



and improvised a method to drive the second gearbox from the output shaft of the first gearbox (there was an unused gear that coincidentally fit the hex output drive shaft, and was compatible with the 38-tooth main crown gear on the input side of the gearbox).

The regular driving gear (which is put on the motor shaft) has 8 teeth; the unused gear has 12 teeth, so the drive ratio of the second gearbox is 11.07:1 instead of 16.6:1 with the original gear.



This means that the final drive ratio is 2255:1.



I noticed that when driving the motor with a single AA alkaline battery, the final output shaft turned at about 5 RPM, which is five times too fast for my barndoor. That damn Mabuchi is like a tiny turbine, according to the specs, it runs from 6990 to 9100 RPM. Makes sense, given the drive ratio of my improvised compound gearbox.

I tried dropping the voltage to the motor by 0.7 volts (by putting a 1N4148 diode in series with the 1.5V AA battery). I took a video of the final output shaft turning; it slowed down for a while when my fingers weren't tight on the AA battery, but one complete revolution took 1 minute and 6 seconds. If I hadn't botched the connection, I expect the time would be almost exactly a minute!

It's a very fortuitous coincidence. My only problem now is regulating that 1.5V, as alkaline batteries are notorious for having non-constant output voltage. I could use the 12V or 6V gel cells I have lying around, but that's a lot of voltage, which I'll have to bring down a great deal.

An additional benefit of that huge gear reduction ratio is that it produces an eye-popping amount of torque. I'm 100% certain that even when loaded with the barndoor, the motor's speed will not be reduced by any significant amount.

Mass Effect, Here I Come!

It's a miracle! my modest system will be able to run the PC version of Mass Effect!

Now, no more need to pine after an XBox 360! Praise be Bioware!

Antique Lenses

I started collecting lenses seven years ago. I sent $70-odd (and another $20 in Western Union fees) to a guy in the Czech Republic for a 135mm f3.5 Carl Zeiss Jena Sonnar. Which I still have (albeit slightly worse for wear). Since then my collection has grown, however I never got to use it much until I got a DSLR in late 2006.

Here's my list (in order of increasing focal length):

• 28mm f2.8 Soligor M42
• 28mm f2.8 Chinon K-mount (doesn't lock on the body)
• 35mm f3.5 Pentax Super-Takumar
• 37mm f2.8 Mir-1V
• 50mm f1.4 Pentax Super-Takumar
• 50mm f2.0 Pentax SMC-M
• 55mm f2.2 Fujinon
• 35-70mm f3.5-4.5 Pentax F
• 85mm f2.0 Jupiter-9
• 135mm f3.5 Carl Zeiss Jena Sonnar
• 135mm f3.5 Pentax Auto-Takumar
• 135mm f3.5 SMC-Pentax M
• 200mm f4.0 Hanimex

Since the destruction of my 50mm f1.8 Canon EF, I'm left with one Canon lens (the 18-55mm EF-S kit) and one non-functional Canon DSLR.

Didn't Miss My Flight

Made it to the 10:20 a.m. Saturday MAS flight to Manila with lots of time to spare. Even managed to find time to buy Lalai a surprise while at the airport.

It turns out, that all of the duty-free shops are in a separate building from the arrival area. This separate building is only reachable via a 2-minute monorail ride.

The inside of the duty free concourse is quite impressive; airy architecture, with a sort of greenery well in the middle (a very tiny rendition of which can be found in Gateway Mall in Quezon City).



The KLIA control tower is the second highest in the world (after the one at Bangkok's new international airport).



The KL airport is extremely impressive, and boasts of being the world's best airport in the 25 Million Passengers/Year category. And it cost $3.5 Billion (US) to build.

In contrast, NAIA Terminal 1 is corroded and dilapidated, worse than Soekarno-Hatta in Jakarta. Terminal 2 is nice and shiny, but small. And Terminal 3... well, news is that portions of the ceiling in some areas have collapsed due to shoddy workmanship and lack of maintenance. Terminal 3's construction and turnover has also been blighted by allegations of corruption. Which, in the Philippines, is no surprise.

It makes me wonder whether the combination of Catholicism and corruption is unique. If we look at Malaysia, they were colonized by the British. And Indonesia was colonized by the Dutch. But in both cases, the colonizers left no lasting cultural impressions.

Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Malaysia are mutually intelligible, and while Filipino has many words in common with Malay (see if you can understand "Tolak pintu dibuka"), it seems to me that Filipino is the most divergent because we have so many Spanish loan words.

If we use this as a correlation, we Filipinos are also the most colonially-influenced of the three countries. It also shows in the food, incidentally. About the only food we have in common with Malaysians and Indonesians is rice, bagoong and patis. About all of our food is Spanish-derived, while nasi lemak is nasi lemak whether you go to Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, or Singapore. These guys haven't heard of adobo!

Filipinos, Malaysians, and Indonesians are all the same folk. So why are we different? (more pertinent, why are we so poor and undisciplined?) I can't help but think that we picked up the most pernicious elements from the Spanish Catholic colonial culture.

We pride ourselves (unjustifiably, in my opinion) as being the only Christian country in Asia. At the rate we're going, we'll also soon be the poorest.

Missed My Flight Part II

Decided to go back to KL city. The thought of doing a Tom Hanks and staying at the airport for 20-plus hours was not very appealing. Checked into the Westin Kuala Lumpur, which my colleague Richard said was cheaper and swankier than Hotel Nikko.

Turns out it is much swankier, but I wasn't able to get the Oracle corporate rate, because I had no reservation. So it comes out to $150 (US) plus-plus (meaning plus tax and service charge). Still comparatively inexpensive, considering that's the non-discounted rate.

Daytime view from my hotel room window:



and night-time view:



Took some photos on the way back to KL city center from the airport. KLIA is infamous for being right smack in the middle of nowhere. It's probinsyang probinsya, so to speak.





The Malaysians also have some HDB-style housing, a small fraction of which is pretty dilapidated. This is the absolute worst I could see from the highway:



Inside of the Pavilion mall near the Westin.



The curved-looking building is the Westin, and the building in front of it is the Marriot.



Star Hill district (the Tarbush Lebanese restaurant where my colleague and I had dinner last night is in this area too):

Missed My Flight

Missed my flight. Very depressing.

I was so looking forward to going home to Lalai today.

Must have had a short-circuit in my brain somewhere. I thought my flight was later in the afternoon, and left the hotel at 12:00 noon. Turns out that Malaysian Airlines MH704 left Kuala Lumpur at 12:00 noon. Ooops.

There's only one direct flight via MAS from KL to Manila, and the next one is tomorrow at 10:20 a.m. There are no more MAS flights to Manila via Singapore; and a one-way ticket to Manila thru Singapore via SQ is a whopping $800.

So I'm sitting in KLIA with free wi-fi typing this. I'm still debating whether I will go the 70-plus kilometers back to KL, or if I'll just expend the 20-plus hours here; they do have duty-free, although my notebook battery is almost flat.

Cheap Goodies and a Creepy Taxi Ride

Today was the last day of the TimesTen Deep Dive training which I delivered here in KL. So, after all of the participants had left for the day, I went to a nearby mall with my colleague from Support. There were a lot of cheap goodies in the "IT Mall" and to my great surprise I discovered that the Samsung SyncMaster 226BW (22" LCD monitor, which I bought early this year for 18,000-odd pesos) only costs 990 RM or roughly 13,000-plus pesos here.

And a DVD writer is 92 RM or about 1,200 pesos.

Not to mention the food is generally much cheaper (about half the price of SG food, or a bit less than Manila food). And to think that they have a higher GDP per capita than the Philippines!

Anyhow, I made a long trek through the IT Mall (where Richard managed to find a 2GB SD card for 35 RM -- cheaper than the 550 pesos at CDR-King -- and a 2GB micro SD for 24 RM I believe). The Acer Aspire 4720 notebook with Turion 64X2 and GeForce 7000M video sells here for 1,999 RM which is 624 USD or about 850 SGD, also cheaper than in Singapore. They also have 300 VA APC UPS for 160 RM, about 2,100 pesos.

However, Canon stuff is not cheaper. A Powershot G9 goes for 1,800 RM which is 560 USD, more expensive than US price although cheaper than Canon Marketing Philippines' huge markup back in Manila.

My colleague and I had a pretty OK dinner at Tarbush Lebanese restaurant. Not bad actually and can't complain about the prices (e.g. 22 RM for the lamb biryani). The biryani wasn't the greatest I've tasted, not enough cinnamon. Not spicy enough for me. I suspect the restaurant staff dialed down the spicyness for the ignorant foreigners or something.

Afterward we went to the side streets where my colleague wanted to buy some KL tee shirts. I ended up buying a couple of glow-in-the-dark shirts (at 10 RM a pop) and this chintzy gewgaw:



It's one of those square glass blocks with the Petronas Towers etched inside. On top of an LED-illuminated turntable which rotates at a very slow rate. The whole contraption cost 28 RM, 370 pesos. I didn't haggle, which my colleague thoroughly disapproved of. The crystal gewgaw was pretty to look at, and I have some dark and evil designs for the rotating base: it rotates at about 1 rpm -- very significant for me, as I can use it as a drive unit for my motorized barndoor astrophotography mount.

Problem: the motorized base is driven by 6V AC. So this might be an AC synchronous motor, which means it would be a severe pain in the butt to drive from a DC power source like a battery. But the base has a battery compartment for three AAA batteries; maybe a DC supply will work.

Another problem is that when I got back to the hotel, I discovered some nicks on the edges of the Petronas glass block. I hadn't looked at it closely enough at the seller's street booth. And it's not worth my while to go back and complain over a sub-200 peso item. Oh well, the nicks aren't visible at normal viewing distances.

I also espied a stall which was selling all manner of astronomical gear. They had these 80mm binoculars mounted on a tripod, for the staggering sum of 1,200 RM or more than 15,000 pesos: although I suspect, given Richard's haggling, that the true price would be less than half of the price tagged 1,200 RM.

The 80mm binocular had red coatings (a real no-no) and was slightly miscollimated. Therefore not worthy of my attention. They also had all manner of smaller binoculars, spotting scopes, monopods, and tripods.

I got these..



for 30 RM a pop. Actually the seller initially asked for 35 RM, so 70 RM for both. I thought the total was 75 RM, so half-heartedly haggled for 70 RM. Duh!

Luckily my colleague came to the rescue and argued the man down to 60 RM for both. 400 pesos for each of these mini-tripods, and with a ball head no less, is a pretty good deal. I will use one of them for its intended purpose, and the other one will be Sacrificed for Science, namely I will use it on my barndoor.

There was another store inside the IT Mall which was selling a 90mm refractor telescope, with 45-degree prism diagonal and 20mm Plossl eyepiece (and an alt-az mount and tripod) for 400 RM. A pretty good deal at that.

Unfortunately I haven't managed to go to Starbucks and buy a Starbucks KL mug.

On our way back to the hotel, we had a creepy conversation with the taxi driver, an ethnic Indian fellow who styled himself "Mr. Jack" (he gave my colleague his "calling card," urging us to give him a call, for reasons which will become readily apparent).

Mr. Jack didn't turn on his taxi meter, negotiating a 15 RM fare for the relatively short distance back to the Hotel Nikko. Even "better" than that, after asking us where we were from, and whether we were in KL for business or on holiday, he forthwith essayed the following spiel:

You want girl? I send to your room, no problem. If you don't like, no problem. I have many girl, 15, 18, 19 years old. You pick. Only 200 RM. If you want all night, only 480 RM. No problem, will send up to your room.

Oook!

My colleague and I were literally slack-jawed in astonishment. However Mr. Jack was not to be dissuaded. It really was kind of creepy. This sort of thing has never happened to me, ever. And boy was I glad to get out of that taxi!

Anyway I'm happy that training is over and I'm going home tomorrow. And I'm happy that I'll be seeing Lalai again.

Looking Up

From our 38th-floor office in Menara Citibank.



Yes, those are low-hanging clouds.

Wrong Side of Hotel Nikko

I'm on the wrong side of the Hotel Nikko Kuala Lumpur. When I look out my window, I see "Ristoran Sin Lok" and a Maybank branch..



instead of the Petronas Towers, which are two blocks away.



The hotel room is fine, I'd say Mandarin Oriental Manila level (the Dusit Hotel in Makati used to be a Nikko Hotel, so pretty much on par). But this hotel room is only 250 RM per night, which comes out to around 3,750 pesos or 90 USD. Which is cheaper than Manila. And in Singapore, 90 USD a night will get you a hotel in the honky-tonk Geylang district. Lalai and I have had the misfortune of staying in one of those hotels, thankfully for only a night.

The airport is quite some distance away from the central business district; about 30 minutes' drive at 90 km/h. The roads are in fantastic condition; not quite Singapore-level, but worlds above the potholed, suspension-busting EDSA. Seems that there's no country I go to which is worse-off than the Philippines. Which is kind of depressing.

What I could see of the countryside (because the airport is in a rural-ish district) from the taxi, this area of Malaysia is like a combination of Indonesia and Singapore. You've got the nice road infrastructure, the well-maintained road embankments, but you've also got these small houses along the side of the road, not shabby, but definitely not HDB class.

Still, leaps and bounds better than the old-tire-secured, rusty-roofed shanties huddled under bridges in Manila.

I have only one minor triumph:



The internet is not fast. Hahaha! upload speed is quite good, but download just plain sucks.

There's a nice park "KLCC Park" overlooking the Petronas Towers. They have a mosque, too. From the mosque I saw along the airport expressway, I'm sure the nearby mosque will be an architectural tour de force. Photographic!

The problem is, I took along the Canon SD500, which has no more batteries (just found out). And I have no charger. I didn't bring along the DSLR because it's a big bulky thing which would add to my troubles carrying baggage. So now.. the only camera I have is the 3-megapixel one built into my phone. Oh well..

Caliraya Clouds

Yesterday was ALP's annual Messier Marathon. As I knew I could not finish my new telescope ball in time, I decided to use what remaining epoxy and fiberglass tape that I had to reinforce my existing acrylic globe. I didn't do this at the start because I was concerned that the epoxy would not adhere very well to the painted interior of the telescope. But, I was running out of time.



Seems to have worked out fine; I didn't have enough epoxy to completely cover the upper hemisphere of the globe, so it sometimes dimples a bit at the un-reinforced portions. But still usable. I also epoxied an additional 5-pound weight (bringing the total weight of the lower unit to around 30 pounds) to balance out the Vixen 32mm Plossl and Rigel Quick-Finder on top.

All of this worked fine.

Lalai and I were able to observe M42 just as it was setting; Sirius; M81 and M82; M101; and the Eta Carina Nebula at Caliraya last night. Problem is there were clouds galore and nobody could get more than a few minutes' worth of observing time.

We were set up on a spit of land in Lake Caliraya, part of the "Eco-Saddle" camp, which is submerged during the rainy season. I don't want to go back there with the Mazda3; getting down onto the spit scraped the aero kit and I will now have to have the car's underbody pressure-washed. There also was a guy with a Chevy Aveo with a canoe on his roof rack. Seems a good place to go, for boating.

I noticed that due to the strong wind, my scope would vibrate obviously at 120X (and that's with no upper shroud). Also it was not completely smooth; there were sticky areas, probably where the acrylic globe would dimple under the weight. It also took quite a bit of effort to align the Quick-Finder, but once working, pointing the scope was very easy.

Setting up the scope was a ten-minute task; and collimating was quite easy (well, only rough, approximate collimation).

Had to use the flash to take this photo: but nobody was imaging anyway.



30-second exposure at ISO 1600, SMC-Pentax 50mm f/2.0 at full aperture. The floating light is the head-mounted flashlight of one of our neighbors (Irving and his friend; they have some really nice gear, a Megrez 90 fluorite APO and a 10" Orion Intelliscope -- which can be seen in the photo covered with plastic against the rain).



James looking up, and Jett sitting at his portable table..



Car, lake, island.



The Southern Cross, with either a satellite track, or a cosmic ray hit at the lower-left corner.



Overall, somewhat of a waste of time, but getting to talk to James and meeting some of the other guys for the first time was nice. Also I got to "field test" my ever-rebuilding scope for real, and for the first time, the experience was more on the good, rather than on the bad. But the horrible traffic on the way to Caliraya, and the hair-raising four-hour drive back home at 2:00 in the morning, was quite stressful.

TV Station Visit

I accompanied one of our sales guys to a TV station last Friday. While waiting our turn to be allowed inside, I saw something which seemed photographically interesting:



A sack of letters destined for the Wish Ko Lang TV show, which is famous for being the recipient of an (unsent) letter from that grade school girl in Davao who hanged herself.

That Wish Ko Lang has so much mail makes one wonder about the state of desperation in the Republic..