Category Archives: Recommendations

Steinhart Apollon : More than meets the eye

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The difficulty about choosing any watch is that it will usually never meet all of one’s criteria for a perfect timepiece. For quite some time now, I’ve been searching for the one watch that fits my personality and my aesthetic tastes. The unintended consequence is that I’ve amassed a small collection of watches (mostly Seikos and G-shocks) that excel in one or two aspects but left me wanting that little bit more.

None of my current watches cost more than a few hundred dollars, since I still cannot fathom why so many premium watches cost the way they do (in the tens of thousands) for the way they are designed (often surprisingly plain to anyone who has a design background). I’m not the kind moved by status or brand power, but by functionality and design. A quick disclaimer is that I’m not a horological expert, but just a guy who likes good gadgets and timepieces are the oldest form of gadgets around.

My criteria for a perfect watch in this phase of my life is pretty straightforward. The watch should be masculine, classical (or rather, timeless), sporty, unique, well-crafted and unpretentious. And I finally found these qualities, give or take a few caveats, in the Steinhart Apollon watch.

Steinhart is a German watchmaking firm that has attained a sizable following in recent years. They released the Apollon late last year, with the unique selling point of offering three interchangeable bezels – stainless steel, bronze and black – in a classic automatic watch design.

At the same time, the watch strap is easily swapped out thanks to the allen key-type screws that is also used for securing the bezels. You can find aftermarket straps at any local watch dealer, but I prefer to go online at Watch Band Center from Germany where the selection is mind-boggling, the prices are reasonable, and it costs less than SGD20 to ship over to Singapore.

So if you are into customizing the look of your gadgets, the Apollon offers an amazing experience in modding that is as easy as putting together a Lego set or Gundam model. In other words, the Apollon is like a Transformer among watches, and you don’t even need to know how to dismantle a watch to get it looking the way you desire.

My friends know that I’m a big fan of modding anything from Xbox chassis decals to my Ninja 250R motorcycle.  Now of course, there have been moddable watches in the past, but few offer the high quality parts like the three bezels that come with this watch.

To complete the package, the Apollon checks all the major boxes for an automatic watch under SGD1,000 – sapphire glass, Swiss automatic movement (ETA 2824-2), Super Luminova on dials, a brushed titanium body, and 300m water resistance. Everything is manufactured with high standards, and it feels and looks way more than it costs.

I purchased it for SGD800 from Gnomon Watches in Singapore, a little high considering the euro SRP of the watch is 440 euro (SGD704) from the Steinhart website. You can order directly from Steinhart itself but do factor in shipping costs.

My favorite bezel, without a doubt, is the bronze piece. Until I purchased this watch, I knew little about the properties of bronze. Then the bronze bezel started to tarnish from the third day and I learned that it was developing “patina” which is a layer that helps to prevent further corrosion. What would we do without Wikipedia?

Patina also imbues the bronze product with a unique vintage look over time, so I guess no two Apollons will look alike after a year. In the photos posted here, the bronze bezel has already developed some patina “stains” and is not as shiny as when I first installed it, but I’m perfectly cool with it.

The bronze form of the Apollon also reminds me of the original Pantheon in Rome, or Mjolnir, Thor’s trusty old hammer. As a big fan of classical sculpture and art, this watch nails it.

My second favorite bezel is the stainless steel piece. As you can see, the watch takes on a completely different look – more like a warrior shield from The Immortals or Captain America’s shield in The Avengers. Coupled with the massive height of the watch (17mm) and the brushed titanium body, the stainless steel Apollon is not unlike the pure chrome Mark II of Iron Man’s armor. It will also pass off as a diver design in this form.

As for the last black bezel, I’m very lukewarm towards it. There are those who like the sports watch look, and this bezel does an okay job. However, it makes the Apollon look a little like the majority of Seiko sports watches out there and does not have the oomph factor in my opinion. This black bezel is not coming out of the dry cabinet anytime soon.

So what’s not to like about this watch?

Firstly, I’m not thrilled about the blue second hand. While the blue color lends the watch a taste of the modern, the watch would have truly gone to the next level had it been a plain chrome or gold color to reinforce the classical look.

Also, the default 24mm wide strap made of Nubuck leather that comes default with the watch is very hard to maintain – the velvety texture ensures that it gets stained a different way each time the watch comes into contact with water. The grey-green color of the strap (you can see it on the Steinhart website) also brings the watch design to an understated level

Luckily, my purchase of the Apollon at Gnomon Watches came with a free 24mm strap and I chose a black leather Rios. I’m still mulling on the Apollon titanium strap that will go very well with the bronze bezel, but it’s pricey at 95 euros.

Finally, the watch is really heavy at 137 grams and I can feel my left elbow developing some extra muscle. The Hulk-height of the watch also means that I have to be careful not to knock it against other objects, and I found my violin string rubbing against the thick strap during practice sessions.

Still, the pros outweigh the cons of the Apollon. My search for the right timepiece has come to an end…for now.

Crippling Learning With Unrealistic Standards

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I was reading a past-year Primary Three mathematics exam paper this evening – with all its ridiculous problem sums – when I decided to write this long-overdue letter and send it to the newspaper forums in Singapore. I also posted it on my Facebook page. The Chinese translation comes courtesy of a good friend.

The Today newspaper published it here, and Lianhe Zaobao published it here. Thank you to the editors who deemed it fit to be published, and to the many parents and readers who shared it across social media. The Straits Times rejected the article as it wanted exclusivity on the piece and it found out Today had published it.

The primary school education system in Singapore has been the point of much debate among educators and parents for a long time now.

As a product of the system in the 1980s, and now a father of two children in Primary One and Three, I fear that the system has become one of irrelevant and unrealistic standards. And I come from the perspective of being someone who has excelled within the old system, yet have always questioned the relevancy of the content we were taught in real-world settings.

Sadly, the situation has only gotten worse.

Let’s take primary school mathematics as an example – why are students being asked to solve questions of higher level logic at such a young age? Does it make them more creative in problem-solving? Does it help them when they are faced with heuristic problems that even adults don’t have to deal with in the workplace? No, it only leads to more rote-learning of – ironically – heuristic methods. The vast selection of assessment books and tuition centers that teach heuristics is testimony to this claim.

Another observation is that school teachers sometimes do not have the opportunity to reinforce the basics of simple arithmetic, and are forced to make their students do sums that are more useful in weeding out mathematical geniuses than genuinely impart knowledge. Within the cramped periods of each school day, it is simply impossible for teachers to cover all the bases in today’s punishing curriculum.

It’s no longer a matter of excelling in class, but to simply pass Mathematics today, it is mandatory to have tuition to fill the gaps that school teachers sometimes struggle to fill. If so many students require tuition, then it means our education system has failed in its basic goal of imparting the correct skill sets.

My wife, a university honours graduate, gave up her job to coach the children at home, but is herself exasperated at the standards required of students today. I have yet to observe any beneficial efforts of pushing children so hard at the primary school level apart from high stress levels and sapping of intellectual curiosity.

Apart from removing the joy in learning, another side effect of today’s education system is that my children hardly have time to enjoy childhood. They have less time to play outdoors, to read their favorite books (which is a great way to improve one’s English), to explore new hobbies or simply to learn about the world around them. All because they have so much homework to do.

I could go on about the other subjects, but the scenarios are the same. The schools are not teaching less, nor are the students learning more.

Ian Tan Yong Hoe

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And here’s the Chinese translation as done by a great friend. This goes to Zaobao.

不切实际的教育标准：学习的绊脚石

长久以来，新加坡小学教育制度是导师和家长们热烈辩论的课题。

我出身于80年代的教育制度，现在已是两名就读小一和小三孩子的父亲，我担忧本地教育制度已是个不切实际并与现实脱节的制度。尽管在当年教育制度下考取好成绩，我当时已经质疑校园所吸收的知识在现实生活中能有多大用处。

遗憾的是，这种情况每况愈下。

就 拿小学数学作例子。为什么学生们必须在年幼时就学习解答更高年级的逻辑习题？这是否真能协助他们以创意思维克服人生障碍？让小学生面对这些成年人在工作 上都无需接触的启发式问题，是否真对学生们有帮助？矛盾的是，这只会导致小学生用死记硬背来学习启发式演算法。课外教材泛滥，补习中心如雨后春笋冒出，足 以证明这一点。

我观察到的另一点是，小学教师往往没有机会着重灌输数学演算法的基础知识，而被迫让学生解答高难度习题。与其传授实用知识，这些深奥习题更像是为选拔数学天才而设。在学习时间有限的学堂，期望教师们在教导现今艰难的课程时面面俱到，是不可能的任务。

今时今日，让小孩子补习，以补充学校教师有时无法或没有时间传授的知识是一个必要。家长这么做，不再是要孩子名列前茅，而只为了让他们能够数学及格，仅此而已。如果这么多学生需要补习，这意味我们的教育制度在传授正确技能这个基本目标方面，是失败了。

我太太是大学荣誉毕业生，为了在家督导孩子而放弃事业，对于小学生面对的严苛考测标准，她感到忧愤。在小学水平就要学生们面对严峻学习挑战，除了带来高度压力，削弱孩童学习好奇心之外，我至今仍然看不出有什么好处。

浇灭学习乐趣不说，现今教育制度的另一个副作用是我的孩子已没有时间好好享受童年。他们没有多余时间进行户外玩乐、或阅读心爱书籍（这是提升语文水平的好方法）、或尝试新嗜好、或只是单纯探索身边周遭的一景一物。这都归咎于他们有太多功课要完成。

对于数学以外的其它科目，情况也是大同小异。学校并没教得更少，学生同时也没学得更多。

陈永和

Presentation Power – Yes You Can!

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A few years ago, I attended a company course called Presentation Power. Its main objective was to teach people how to make more powerful and impactful presentations. I’m going to distill the entire course (or at least what I can remember of it) into one single sentence:

“What’s in it for your audience to listen to you for more than a minute?”

You can be speaking on any topic on earth, but as long as you know what your audience is interested in listening to, and you know how to tell it that way, you’re already a powerful presenter.

I write this post because recently, I sat through an awful presentation. The presenter spoke English well (he’s a native speaker) and he had interesting things to say. Unfortunately, it was on a topic I had little interest in, and I was made to believe before the meeting that we would be discussing about something else.

I gave it my all to be as polite as possible and listen to what he had to say (why, maybe there might be something I could learn or benefit from this), but then it was Death by Powerpoint for nearly an hour. Look, I might work for Microsoft and I do use the Office Suite a lot, but I can tell you that with a great program comes great responsibility – Powerpoint is very easily used for the wrong purposes.

To make it worse, the Powerpoint deck he was using, appeared to be designed for another audience and objective in mind, but the presenter had deemed it okay to re-use it on me. To cut the long story short, by the end of the presentation I was really tired and not really interested in finding out more.

Not everyone can be a good or great presenter, and I think I speak too much Singlish to be a great orator. However, I can share with you a few tips I learned from the course, my journalism experience (where I met hundreds of good and horrible speakers) and my work in Microsoft.

1. Be very clear, both to yourself and your audience, what you are going to speak about before you even begin. Otherwise you’re mismanaging expectations. I often dread attending church when their most boring and longwinded speaker is giving a sermon, and ironically, he gave a sermon called “Are you wasting your time” a few weeks ago.

2. Give a good summary page/overview of your presentation, so your audience has a chance to tell you which segments they might want to skip to. Or just get to the point and expand upon it from there.

3. Use as few slides as possible. Some people have learnt how to cut down on the number of images and text paragraphs on their slides, but it’s still not enough. You have to distil distil distil your slides until it contains the barest minimum of information and visuals. Let your mouth do the talking, and not have people staring at the slides all the time trying to read reams of information.

4. Learn to read your audience and adjust your presentation on the fly. Are they yawning? Are they getting stoned out? Are they playing with their handphone? What is the reason? The one thing NOT to do is to keep droning on until you get to say what you planned to say. The right thing to do is to engage them directly and start asking them questions. You get to know if they were listening, if they were interested or if their mind is already on another planet. The feedback that you get from them will allow you to decide if  you want to change topic, cut short your speech or just do something else.

Once you lose your audience’s attention, your presentation has broken down.

5. Give them a great reason (or many reasons) to listen to you with absolute rapt attention. Like I wrote earlier, what’s in it for them to bother about you and your topic? No matter whether you are a sales guy, journalist, teacher, doctor etc, your audience needs a good reason to keep listening to what you have to say. Does it benefit them financially or emotionally? Is it a matter of life and death? Will it change society as they know it? Can you say it in five minutes instead of fifty?

(Note to church preachers – you don’t need to fill up the entire 45min speaking slot you know).

Really, you don’t have to speak like a lawyer to be a great presenter. Just put yourself in the shoes of your audience and you can soon see the flaws of your presentation. Poor presentations are often the same in nature – they just don’t connect with the audience.

Sadly, many people are only interested in listening to themselves, not someone else, and that’s why they’ll never understand what an effective presentation should sound like.

You can avoid their pitfalls very easily – just recall all the bad presentations you’ve been in, or keep observing the bad one you’re stuck in right now – and ask yourself how do you avoid boring/annoying people like the guy on the stage.

How to increase your likability by Kawasaki

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From Guy Kawasaki’s blog. Some of the words are a bit small and hard to read, but because it is a vector image, you can zoom in (Try CTRL + on a PC, and Command + on a Mac) to read the text. I was so excited by this image I bought the book “Enchantment” immediately on Amazon as a Kindle ebook. After 2 hours, I am already halfway through it and feeling uber inspired.

Enchantment - Increase Likability

Nikon should have gone further than 1-inch

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I’ll just start off with the disclaimer that I don’t fancy Nikon cameras. There is a long story behind how I gained much respect for the Nikon semi-auto F4 camera, and lost it all when I was forced to use the atrocious Nikon D1 as a young photojournalist. When it comes to professional dSLRs, it’s Canon or bust for me.

(Never mind the fact that I use my Olympus Pen more frequently than any other camera these days.)

Anyway, the world was waiting for Nikon to announce its new mirrorless camera system and they did just that this week. I was expecting more from Canon’s longtime rival, but they lived up to their disappointing reputation. Calling it the “Nikon 1″ system after the 1-inch sensor in the camera body, this will no doubt send the fanboys into ecstasy. But there is little reason to, and here’s my take.

The 1″ sensor is just too small to compete

Here’s how the various sensor sizes stack up, from Dpreview.com

This Dpreview article goes into detail about why the author thinks that making a 1″ sensor system will work well for Nikon – that it will not cannibalize their cash cow dSLR market. I completely disagree. The Nikon sensor needs to be at least as big as the Micro Four Thirds sensor to succeed.

dSLRs, despite their popularity, are really designed more for professional work than casual use. The casual user will probably never bother to learn how to use the manual dials on his dSLR camera, and sooner or later, will be frustrated by the sheer bulk of it. Neither will they be keen in investing in better zoom lenses, or even prime lenses.

The main reason why many people have upgraded to dSLRs in the past ten years, is due to the obvious limitations of their compact cameras in terms of image quality and flexibility. And some very effective marketing too.

With the Micro Four Thirds and NEX sensors being about half the size of a 35mm film frame, yet producing an image that is nearly as good in color and resolution as a dSLR (to most consumers), the three small players Panasonic, Olympus and Sony have grabbed an amazing amount of market share in just two years.

According to this Bloomberg article, the mirrorless camera has jumped from 5% in 2009 to 40% market share today in Japan. Canon and Nikon’s number crunchers must be petrified by this figure, but I’m sure things aren’t so bleak for them worldwide. Still, it’s a sign of things to come as the Japanese are often early adopters.

Nikon is coming into a new market that has been created by the smaller players. It has to play by their rules and benchmarks. By now, many consumers may have become aware of the great quality produced by the current crop of mirrorless cameras. Consumers are not stupid, and many do their research online (especially those who can afford a mirrorless camera worth USD700).

It just takes a few review websites to demonstrate in coming weeks that a smaller sensor will not produce the same image quality, especially at the same megapixels. It will also produce less depth-of-field effect, which is a great marketing tool (hey see that dreamy out of focus look!).

Nikon might be trying to avoid cannibalizing its own dSLR market, but as market data already shows, the mirrorless cameras have already done just that. So why not just go with what consumers want, and grow the market by selling a big-sensor mirrorless camera rather than run away from the inevitable decline of dSLR units?

The Nikon V1 is not that small

And furthermore, Olympus has an upcoming Micro Four Thirds camera called the E-PM1 that is 110 x 64 x 34 mm in dimensions. The Nikon V1 is 113mm x 76mm x 44mm, and the lower-end J1 is 106mm x 61mm x 30mm. The J1 is not that much smaller, and yet has a smaller image sensor than the Micro Four Third line of cameras.

Now personally, I’m comfortable shooting with a modern smartphone, my Olympus XZ-1 compact, my Pen camera or EOS 5D. They all produce great images for the money, and my photography experience can help overcome most of the inherent limitations they pose. But to the average joe, they want the best of every world, and yet they don’t know how to expose a photo correctly. They just want to buy a camera that can do it all, and must be the most advanced out there if they are going to fork out the cash.

The consumer will judge the Nikon 1 system not merely by its design, but by its minute specifications and review ratings. So unless Nikon pulls a big rabbit out of the hat, the N1 series already takes a hit before launch.

Legacy lenses support but…

What can help Nikon or Canon catch up is some form of legacy support for its older lenses on the new, smaller body. On my Pen, you can use an adapter ring to mount other bigger Oly E lenses or old school manual lenses from brands like Leica. For example, I currently use a 25mm lens meant for the bigger E-series on my Pen.

The Nikon 1 system will have an adaptor for older Nikkor lenses, but the crop factor is so high at 2.7x, I’m not sure if this will entice any existing Nikkor owner to get the new body. For example, if my maths is correct, a 24mm Nikkor wide angle lens will produce a telescopic 65mm field of view on the N1, totally negating the value of the original wide angle. And imagine a 300mm Nikkor lens on a Nikon 1 body! This is all because, I reiterate, the sensor is just too small.

I won’t comment on subjective things like design (I do dig the metallic red!) but I would just say that in trying to compete with the smaller players, Nikon may have actually forgotten that it’s no longer just a two-horse race. Instead, the hounds are actually racing ahead of the horses.

Now, I could be completely wrong in my analysis above and the Nikon 1 does roaring business when it launches in late October. And my bias towards Canon will never motivate me to buy a Nikon to begin with.

I just hope I’ve laid out some objective facts before you spring for this system. Do give all the various platforms a try and make your own decision.

Let’s see what Canon comes up with, and I hope to be thrilled.

Update: An interview with Nikon’s RnD GM was published by Dpreview after I had posted the above. It’s interesting how the Nikon 1 sensor is able to do all sorts of advanced stuff like shoot at 60 frames per second, and uses a hybrid autofocus system. There’s also this quote:

And, if the company’s market research is correct, there’s every chance this market sector’s expectations are very different from those of the enthusiast photographers who are currently scratching their heads and expressing their dissatisfaction about the new product.

Hey, they’re referring to me! But Nikon, please hear me out. For any new camera system to take hold of the mainstream, it is often up to us early adopters and enthusiasts, as well as the professionals, to embrace it and start spreading the word around. The average consumer is not confident of investing in any new camera system unless it is obviously amazing/groundbreaking or comes with much recommendation from their friends or from their social networks.

One mistake I felt that Olympus made when they were launching the Pen system in 2009 was trying to attract the female crowd with lifestyle ads. That’s not wrong in itself, but they failed to convince the early adopters and pros to come onboard (“is this Pen a girly camera?”), and that’s also part of the reason why Panasonic had more opportunity to shape the market despite Oly launching its products first. There are those of us who sprung for the EP-1 immediately at launch even without reading an Oly ad (and I never regretted it), but there are even more who have sat on the fence because of mixed messaging.

And Nikon is also assuming that the new features they’ve packed into the Nikon 1 system is a big carrot to entice the average consumer – let’s see how the market reacts.

And I always thought I was being objective

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I was at our neighborhood watch shop today and checking out a Seiko model. I noticed that the second hand was not pointing directly north, and was aligned a little to the left, by a mere fraction of a millimeter.

The shopkeeper looked puzzled and took a good look at the watch. He said: “No, it’s pointing straight up! If it is misaligned, I’ll have to send it back to the distributor but it looks ok to me.”. His father also took a quick check and affirmed there was no issue.

I took another close look again and it was just a bit off. And as an ex-photographer, I do pride myself on noticing the smallest details, especially when something minute is misaligned.

Both of us were puzzled for a while, then I took a look at my own Seiko wrapped around my wrist. To my horror, the second hand was misaligned in the same way as the shop’s Seiko!

I realized that it could be related to my lazy (left) eye, so I closed my right eye and voila, the second hand was aligned correctly on both watches. I took off my glasses and peered closely at the watches, and there was no more apparent parallax error. But when I put on the glasses again and looked at the watches at arm’s length, there, it seemed a little misaligned once again. The stereo image my mind was forming was misaligned, not the watch.

Just so you know, I’m very short-sighted in my right eye (about 400 degrees) and just mildly myopic in the other (about 150 degrees). This was because as a child, I  used to read lying down on my side and put too much strain on my right eye. Over time, the right eye became the dominant one while the left eye became the “lazy eye”.

So as I thought about it, it could have been two reasons:

1. The glass curvature in my right spectacle lens was causing light to bend more than it should. Rather unlikely but you’d never know. 

2. My brain is so used to processing information from my right eye in priority to the left over the years, that now when I see a stereo image, it is actually an image with a bias towards the data coming in from the right eye. 

It dawned upon me that this was a demonstration of the brain’s wiring that leads to our lack of objectivity and personal bias. No matter how balanced we think we are, our brains may be processing information in different channels and mixtures.

So before I tell someone that “I’m objective about this matter! I can see both sides of the story”, I’ll take a step back and think hard: “What am I seeing wrong about the picture here? Or what am I not seeing though it is right in front of me?”

Frightening isn’t it, when what you always thought was a fair and balanced worldview, turns out to be otherwise.

A journey with the Space Battleship Yamato

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For better or worse, I tend to go overboard with my hobbies. What was supposed to be a dalliance with photography turned into a full-time job. My love for tinkering of PCs has kept me working with, and currently, in the IT industry. And about a year ago, I started to get fascinated with Bandai model kits and now I have more paint bottles and unopened model kits than I can keep track of.

I’ve been trying out various grades of Gundam model kits to develop my airbrushing and assembly skills. But when I found this Space Battleship Yamato 1/500 scale model kit, I knew that this would be the one kit to pour all my learning into.

Now let it be clear that I don’t really like battleships, whether they are WWII models or even Star Destroyers. It’s more fascinating to admire the small planes that take up space on a carrier (eg. Tomcat, Phantom etc). And I remember building a few ship models when I was in primary school and hating the whole gluey mess along with ridiculously small parts.

But the Yamato is different. For one thing, this formed part of our childhood memories. Our generation of boys watched dozens of iconic Japanese cartoons when they aired randomly on SBC’s Channel 8 during the 1970s and 1980s. With little to do in the house in those days before the Internet or Xbox, one could spend hours just watching different anime dubbed in Mandarin. And the unique mix of a traditional Japanese warship with futuristic space cruiser elements really sticks in the mind for decades.

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Bandai cashed in on the Takuya Kimura movie vehicle late last year with this new plastic model kit that stretches across 70cm in length. Before I started on the kit, I looked around the Internet to see how others had built their versions. Without painting, the kit looks like a big piece of flat plastic. OK, many different pieces of plastic.

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But I also wondered how much “realism” or weathering effects to give this baby. As I’ve gotten more into this “gunpla” hobby, I have observed that too many people spend big money on kits and airbrushing systems without understanding the basics of aesthetics.

For example. I would look at some of the showcase models at some of the hobby shops in Singapore and shake my head at the over-Gundam shading done on beautiful models. Less is more, folks. In my case, my background in art and photography does help me visualize the final look of my kits.

Now while I would prefer a cleanly painted and glossy robot that looked like it just stepped out of the factory, the Yamato demands a dirty or aged look. The anime and movie are set in dire times for humanity, and the Yamato first emerges from its underground factory, breaking through concrete and mud. A flat coat of paint would not give the Yamato the character it deserves – so there was not much choice but to give it gradated airbrushing and further washes of grey to bring about the post-apocalyptic look.

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This project took about three months, or perhaps eight to ten man days. A lot faster than the last Votoms Scopedog project that took nearly a year thanks to prolonged procrastination.

Overall, I would say that the Yamato is relatively easy to build until you come to the small parts. On some turrets, some plastic pieces broke off (combination of thin plastic parts and several layers of paint) and I either glued them back or just threw them away. The nice thing about a “weathered” look is that you can always claim it was “battle damage” when it comes to missing or broken parts.

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On one hand I was terrified of losing the tiny turret parts (there are about 34 turrets if I counted correctly). On the other hand, pressing them into the main ship body really caused my fingertips to hurt, and a few other hull parts cracked in the process.

The other difficulty I had was deciding what shade of medium blue to use. The red was easy – just go for a screaming red tone like a Ferrari. The blue was tough because if you go for the default blue that the plastic was moulded in, the whole ship looks too dull. A lighter blue would allow for more details to be called out, but would not contrast well with the red lower hull. Personally I think I could have used a deeper shade of blue but what the heck.

The other odd thing I noticed was during the final panel lining stage, using black enamel paint to wash over the base acrylic coats. With the semi-glossy red portions, it was easy to remove excess wash with thinner. With the dull blue portions, the enamel paint was very hard to remove with enamel thinner so I had to work fast and use it to create more weathering effects like vertical streaks across the hull. Perhaps I had to coat the entire ship with a glossy coat before I did the panel lining.

Oh well, live and learn. Enjoy the pics, taken with my trusty Canon 5D. Which I had trouble taking in my cramped HDB apartment because this ship is just so long!

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Living a disciplined life

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nike plus sportband

Gadgets can change your life in the most unexpected ways.

Last Christmas, I bought myself a Nike Plus Sportband which works with a Nike sensor in your running shoes to track your pace and distance.

I bought it because I thought it might help me do better at my IPPT fitness test in March but it went much further and transformed the way I’ve been living my life in 2011. Here’s what happened:

Previously, I would use online maps to decide the distances that I would run around the Bishan area. The trouble was that I did not have a fixed running schedule, so there would be weeks or months between each run. And that I could never go past the 3km mark because my mind was telling me that the distance was long enough.

After all, the only reason why I ran was to ensure I would pass the annual 2.4km test for National Service.

The Nike Sportband changed my approach to running because it keeps a constant log of all your runs and speeds “in the cloud”. And with every upload of data, you can share your latest run on Twitter and/or Facebook. You can see this as either showing off to your friends, or asking them to keep you accountable on your running regime. And because it measures your running pace, it makes you feel embarrassed if you drop below your usual speed.

Over the past seven months, I found myself running three times a week, and at least 5km each time. That’s phenomenal by my own standards, because apart from my dragonboat and army days, I could never bring myself to go exercising regularly. At one point in April, I actually ran over 10km, which was the first time in 15 years. To date I have clocked about 288km since last Dec and by God’s grace, my knees are still feeling fine.

At the same time, as I dragged myself out of bed every other day at 6am, I began thinking about how to lead a more disciplined life. Where I used to relish in an unpredictable life, I now desired more order, more control and more awareness.

- I sleep earlier now and have largely stopped playing PC or console games so I can have enough energy to run. Doing up a Gundam model can take months instead of days as my sleep comes first.

- I’m trying my best to practice my violin so my teacher doesn’t give me his weary look every Monday. But man, scales and arpeggios are more tiresome than work! 

- I began to go to work earlier so I could get some emails done before 9am.

- I started an aquarium which required me to do constant water changes and daily feeds (It’s been a really tough hobby as I’ve had two or three batches of fish die on me, but the latest bunch of tetras seem to be doing well)

- I drove less and walked more, to add more calories burnt every day.

- And recently, spurred on by a finance discussion with old buddy Weizheng, I decided to cut excessive bills like my Starhub broadband account (I went from 100mbps to 30mbps with a recontract), and started to balance my budget for each month with Excel and an expense tracker on my phone.

It could be that I’m getting older and being more careful about my health and expenses. But I do attribute a lot of the changes to the daily discipline and clearer thinking (running clears the mind, my friends) unwittingly enforced by the Sportband.

In an ironic twist, the Sportband didn’t help my 2.4km run very much. In fact, my timing actually got worse compared to last year. That’s because I’ve gotten so used to running longer distances at a slower pace, I really struggled to run briskly during the 2.4km test!