5 km/hour Speed Tolerance in School Area

When I had a driver licence test 5 year ago, I sure remember the examiner told me that there is a 10km/hour speed limit tolerance in some situation. However, what I got just today in my mailbox was an infringement notice asking me to pay $30 due to the exceeded speed limit of 6km/hour in the area of 50km/hour speed limit.



So, why is that? As a good citizen, I really want to know what I have done wrong. It's not about the 30 bucks, but it's about knowing my mistake.

After browsing the NZ Police website, I found one updated rule that can show my mistake. This updated rule is actually part of "Speed Kills Kids Programme".

Police Speed Enforcement Policy

The current Police speed policy specifies that:

• Drivers of vehicles other than heavy motor vehicles who exceed the speed limit by less than 11km/h will not normally be issued with an infringement notice providing their speed does not present a risk to public safety in the prevailing circumstances.
• These principles do not constitute a mandate for drivers to exceed the speed limit. In some circumstances exceeding the speed limit by less than 11km/h will pose road safety risks.

Speed Kills Kids Programme

In the vicinity of schools, particularly during the high-risk morning and afternoon periods, a significant risk is posed to school children by speeding drivers and it is considered that a lower enforcement tolerance by both speed cameras and staff is critical to reducing child pedestrian casualties. Therefore Police will strictly enforce a 5km/hour tolerance within 250 meters on each side of school boundaries to counter a quantifiable and publicly obvious road safety risk.

This initiative provides a sound and logical way in which to stimulate public debate around the impact of travel speed on pedestrian injury severity and to reduce the road safety risks to children travelling to and from school

As can be seen in the infringement notice above, the camera snapped me just in front of St. Pauls School. My exceeded limit is 6km/hour, whilst the enforced limit under that programme is 5km/hour.

But, take a closer look at the time, it's 16:29 hrs. The school normally finishes at 15:00 and kids may walk around that area, just say, until 16:00 hrs.

At 16:29, there are no school kids on the road. Most of them may play Playstation or watch movie/tv at home.

Perhaps, some of the kids have working parents and still walk around the school waiting to be picked up. Offices finish at 17:00, so the kids have 2 hours waiting. But, please don't play around the road, it's dangerous, just go inside the school field.

Or perhaps, somebody just forgot to turn the camera off. However, I will pay.

Kapital Endorsement for Zero Interest Agreement

Kapital Endorsement for Zero Interest Agreement or can be shortened as K.E.Z.I.A.

As can be seen from the terminology, it means a document, or just say a financial instrument, like a bond or share, that can turn loan/debt/liability into capital ("kapital" in German) through some market valuation with a zero interest agreement for some agreed terms and conditions. In short, the lender can have ownership but has to give up the interest outstanding.

For example, a company had a $1,000,000 loan with 5 year maturity and floating rate interest. In the third year, the company thinks that the interest cost served to the lender would seem to be high and may damage the profitability. The company then offer the lender to consider converting the loan into shares for some agreed value but forgetting the remaining 2 years interest.

Is it fair? It's just a fictional financial instrument anyway. Nonetheless, I would do some further digging on this.

Telepon ke Jakarta 20 menit hanya $0.99

Menelepon ke Indonesia menggunakan Yahoo Voice PhoneOut ternyata jauh lebih murah dari SkypeOut, apalagi dibandingkan layanan Calling Card yang beredar di NZ, seperti ChiTel, KiwiTalk dan lain-lain.

Biaya telepon per menitnya hanya USD0.029 (NZD0.046), dan ini terbukti dengan telepon yang saya buat tadi malam.

20 menit hanya USD0.58 atau NZD0.99 saja !
Caranya:
- Download Yahoo Messenger with Voice Beta 7.5
- Test connectivity headphone dan microphone
- Buy PhoneOut credit USD10 atau USD25

GooglePage

I just got email something like this, that you may also receive in the future if you haven't got one:

From: The Google Page Creator Team Mailed-By: google.com
To: The Google Page Creator Team
Date: Mar 22, 2006 1:39 PM
Subject: Google Page Creator -- Sign up!

Hi there,

Thanks for your interest in Google Page Creator. We appreciate your patience, and we're excited to tell you that we enabled your account today, so you can start making pages now! To get started, head over to http://pages.google.com and sign in with your Gmail password. We haven't opened up Google Page Creator to everybody yet, so you'll see a message on our home page saying that accounts are unavailable — you can just ignore that.

Google Page Creator is an experiment on Google Labs. Google Labs is where we put projects before they're ready for prime time so that we can start getting feedback from our users. So, please, tell us what you think, what features we should add, what problems you're experiencing, or anything else that can help us make Google Page Creator a better tool for you. We're listening.

This is the only email we'll be sending you — unless you'd like to receive updates in the future.

— The Google Page Creator team

And now, I have one page managed and hosted by Google.
http://jeffrymerril.liando.googlepages.com/

Thanks Google.

Kneewalking

As part of the natural event of human development, this is what was happening a month ago, before she walks.

Amazing Moment of Human Development

This morning (20/03/06), we've been experiencing such an amazing moment of human development that proves that there is only a natural event in human evolution. It is so natural as nobody can't make up.

Sukuk Index: The First Islamic Bond Index

Dow Jones Islamic Market Index introduced in 1999 includes stocks of companies which are not considered suitable for Islamic investing. Incompatible lines of business include : alcohol, pork-related products, conventional financial services (banking, insurance, etc.), entertainment (hotels, casinos/gambling, cinema, pornography, music, etc.), and tobacco manufacturers or defense and weapons companies.

After indexing in stock market now in bond market, the new Dow Jones Citigroup Sukuk Index or the first Islamic Bond Index will be launched on 2 April 2006.

Dow Jones Indexes and Citigroup Corporate and Investment Banking, both leading global index providers, today announced that they intend to launch the Dow Jones Citigroup Sukuk Index, the first index that seeks to measure the performance of global bonds complying with Islamic investment guidelines.

The index, which is intended to launch April 2, was created primarily for use as the benchmark for investors seeking exposure to Shari’ah-compliant fixed-income investments. In addition, the index may serve to increase secondary market trading in this growing asset class and facilitate cross-market relative value trading among different asset classes.

The Dow Jones Citigroup Sukuk Index will include investment-grade, U.S. dollar-denominated Islamic bonds – also known as Sukuk – issued in the global market. At launch, the Index initially will track seven issues: Islamic Development Bank, Solidarity Trust Services Ltd, BMA International Sukuk, Qatar Global Sukuk, Malaysia Global Sukuk, Sarawak Sukuk and Dubai Global Sukuk.

To be included in the Index, an Islamic bond must comply with both Shari’ah law and the Bahrain-based Auditing & Accounting Organization of Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI) standards for tradable Sukuk. Once a bond meets these criteria, Dow Jones Indexes and Citigroup will apply market-based criteria such as minimum maturity of one year, minimum issue size of US$250 million, and an explicit or implicit rating of at least BBB-/Baa3 by leading rating agencies.

“Sukuk, or Islamic fixed-income securities, have emerged over recent years as an increasingly important asset class. It can be expected that we will see the issue of a significant number of corporate, quasi-sovereign and sovereign Sukuk in the future, along with the development of a liquid and efficient Islamic capital market,” said Michael A. Petronella, president, Dow Jones Indexes/Ventures. “The co-operation with Citigroup to calculate and market the Dow Jones Citigroup Sukuk Index combines experience in the Islamic bond market with expertise in Islamic finance and indexing.”

(read more)

My Quotes

Below are my quotes.

A genuinely productive friendship is a relationship as shown by Marx and Engels. Between them, both cannot determine who the boss is.

Despite Marx and Engels were so close, they were not "that kind" you think. How close were they? How many days were they had been spending together without having opposing arguments?

A collaborative work is a master piece. Noone can decide whom is belong to.

Engels Quotes

Below are some quotes from Friedrich Engels that I grabbed from here.

All history has been a history of class struggles between dominated classes at various stages of social development.

By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.

Everything must justify its existence before the judgment seat of Reason, or give up existence.

Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.

The proletariat uses the State not in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the State as such ceases to exist.

The state is not abolished, it withers away.

The state is nothing but an instrument of opression of one class by another - no less so in a democratic republic than in a monarchy.

Marx Quotes

Below are some quotes from Karl Marx that I grabbed from here.

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

All social rules and all relations between individuals are eroded by a cash economy, avarice drags Pluto himself out of the bowels of the earth.

Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.

Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.

Capital is money, capital is commodities. By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.

Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer.

Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.

Civil servants and priests, soldiers and ballet-dancers, schoolmasters and police constables, Greek museums and Gothic steeples, civil list and services list - the common seed within which all these fabulous beings slumber in embryo is taxation.

In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.

The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.

The product of mental labor - science - always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.

We should not say that one man's hour is worth another man's hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time's carcass.

Men are Dog's Best Friends

"Dogs are Man's Best Friends" adalah suatu pernyataan yang kelihatannya lebih subyektif terhadap anjing karena kemampuannya untuk bersosialisasi dengan manusia. Anjing memiliki social skill yang tinggi terhadap suatu kelompok, termasuk kelompok manusia, yang ternyata dari titik pandangnya, adalah bagian dari kelompoknya (Pack: a group of dogs). Hal inilah yang membuat anjing mampu beradaptasi dengan manusia, mengerti bahasa dan mengikuti perintah yang diucapkan. Sementara, manusia pada kenyataanya hanya memiliki kemampuan bersosialisasi terhadap kelompok manusia saja (itupun masih sering terjadi social clash and slack).

Anjing sudah menjadi hewan domestik selama 15.000 tahun ketika manusia mengambil srigala menjadi binatang piaraan. Anjing terbukti sebagai keturunan srigala. Anjing itu buta warna, tapi lingkup penglihatannya bisa mencapai 270 derajat. Mereka mampu mendengar dan memposisikan arah langkah orang hingga 30 meter dari pagar rumah. Mereka juga mampu mendeteksi satu aroma di antara berbagai macam aroma.

Sabtu 4 Maret 2006 kemarin, Hamilton City Council mengadakan program "Dog Day Afternoon". Program ini diselenggarakan setiap tahun yang biasanya bertempat di Innes Common, Hamilton Lake.

Search Toolbar Beta in a Toolbar

I came up with some screen capture on my browser, searching "yahoo toolbar" in Google Toolbar and searching "google toolbar" in Yahoo Toolbar.

No, it has to be replaced

No, that didn't work. It worked however for some time but not after I turned off my laptop last night. It came up with same problem like before this morning. It has to be replaced indeed. The accent guy was right actually, my friends' advice just didn't work.

I got the quotation from Dell @ $231.75 (incl GST) for a 40GB 5400RPM 8MB Fujitsu HD , but I managed to get one from a local computer store for $133.88 (incl GST). The bad old one was Hitachi TravelStar. Fujitsu is better? I'm not sure yet.

Anyway, there's a lot of HDs for notebook offered in the market. When it comes to choosing the good one, Fujitsu is quite recommended.

I only created one big NTFS partition, eventhough the original Dell's HD has two partition, one NTFS for main storage and one FAT partition for ghost image and restoring.

I installed the dsl modem first before the antivirus so the live update can run. Right, everything is installed, the drivers, the applications, the relevant softwares. See how it goes.

By the way, I'm thinking to install Fedora 4 for alternative OS. Hmmm...