Mailboxes

The Stone Mailbox and the Regular Mailbox on on Facebook made me wonder about the designs available for real world mailboxes.

The last 3 years, we have lived in countries that hardly deal in mail, if you want anything to reach, you are better of couriering it. Dubai does have Commercial Mailboxes, so most people just tend to give their office mailbox address to receive their personal mail. This is quite an accepted practice in Dubai.

Even in countries where we have received mail regularly, the building society has had a kind of multi unit Residential Mailboxes System. Here a series of boxes are located on the ground floor, saving the postman the rtrouble of trudging up a couple of floors just to deliver you, your junk mail!

But the designs that truly interest me are Mailboxes like these:


Which have so much of a design element to them and you can use them to express your individuality outside your home.

What do you think?

Japanese Paddy Art

When I first received the mail, I thought it was another hoax doing the rounds, but seems that this is true. Villagers in Inakadate, Japan are creating art in their paddy fields. Hence this is art that is also edible. Art that disappears when the crop is ready to harvest and art that is renewed with each harvest.

Love the concept. More on Japan Times

Stunning crop art has sprung up across rice fields in Japan . But this is no alien creation – the designs have been cleverly planned and planted.
Farmers creating the huge displays use no ink or dye. Instead, different colours of rice plants have been precisely and strategically arranged and grown in the paddy fields.

As summer progresses and the plants shoot up, the detailed artwork begins to emerge.

A Sengoku warrior on horseback has been created from hundreds of thousands of rice plants, the colours created by using different varieties, in Inakadate in Japan

The largest and finest work is grown in the Aomori village of Inakadate , 600 miles north of Toyko, where the tradition began in 1993.

The village has now earned a reputation for its agricultural artistry and this year the enormous pictures of Napoleon and a Sengoku-period warrior, both on horseback, are visible in a pair of fields adjacent to the town hall.

More than 150,000 vistors come to Inakadate, where just 8,700 people live, every summer to se the extraordinary images.

Each year hundreds of volunteers and villagers plant four different varieties of rice in late May across huge swathes of paddy fields.



Napoleon on horseback can be seen from the skies, created by precision planting and months of planning among villagers and farmers in Inkadate.



Fictional warrior Naoe Kanetsugu and his wife Osen appear in fields near the town of Yonezawa , Japan .

And in recent years, othe villages have joined in with the plant designs.

Another famous rice paddy art venue is near the town of Yonezawa in the Yamagata prefecture.

This year's design shows the fictional 16th-century samurai warrior Naoe Kanetsugu and his wife, Osen, whose lives feature in the television series Tenchijin.

Various artworks have popped up in other rice-farming areas of Japan this year, including designs of deer dancers.



Smaller works of crop art can be seen in other rice-farming areas of Japan , such as this image of Doraemon and deer dancers.

The farmers create the murals by planting little purple and yellow-leafe kodaimai rice along with their local green-leafed tsugaru roman variety, to create the coloured patterns between planting and harvesting in September.

The murals in Inakadate cover 15,000 square metres of paddy fields. From ground level, the designs are invisible, and viewers have to climb the mock castle tower of the village office to get a glimpse of the work.

Rice-paddy art began there in 1993 as a local revitalization project, an idea that grew out of meetings held by the village committee.



Closer to the image, the careful placing of thousands of rice plants can be seen in the paddy fields.


The different varieties of rice plants grow alongside one another to create the masterpieces.

In the first nine years, the village office workers and local farmers grew a simple design of Mount Iwaki every year.

But their ideas grew more complicated and attracted greater attention. In 2005 agreements between landowners allowed the creation of enormous works of rice paddy art.

A year later, organisers used computers to plot the precise planting of the four differently coloured rice varieties that bring the images to life.

Getting a laptop/computer to work

Its very irritating to be working on your laptop/computer and you try to install something or download a file and a message pops up "Missing XYZ driver, please install and try again"

Times like these, I could almost through the latop out the window in frustration. Where on Earth am I supposed to go searching for a driver? The hardware company whose brand laptop you use, then the software guys websites or googling it normally is the route to go.

Then today, I discovered Driver Access which claims to have over a million drivers in their database. While this is not a claim that is easily verifiable, they do seem to have a rather large collection.

Whether you are looking for Computer Drivers, Webcam Drivers, Motherboard Drivers or USB Drivers, Driver Access has a solution.

They even offer a free driver scan for your machine, so you can check which drivers need updating and premptively get the newer versions, before you have to confront that error message again.

Math and Tutoring

As a Math Major in College, I am sometimes asked to provide Math Help to my friends children. If the kids are younger, then its a pretty easy proposition, but if they are in the senior grades, then I seem to have forgotten some of my old mathematical concepts in the race with Management Concepts.

Hence I am then forced to relearn and re read mathematical concepts that I don't use on a daily basis in my current job, to teach someone else's kid. How poetic is that!

Fortunately with the advent of Online Math Tutoring, my time is now not being encroached upon. Sites have become more sophisticated and offer 24*7 Online Math Help.

So, advise to parents trying to get their kids to understand math, is to spare yourself, your friends and your kids the torture of trying to tutor them and rely on help from Online math tutors, who are more current in their knowledge and hence better able to help your child.

Telling Time

Recent movies, like Land of The Lost have refreshed public interest in the concept of time travel. I for one, would be happy if people I make appointments with, here in Egypt would at least be on time for meetings in this dimension and space.

Many years ago, when I worked in the manufacturing sector, we often gifted watches and alarm clocks to factory workers. While workers appreciated the gift, it also implied that they now had no reason to turn up late. (Given that the most common reason for arriving late was that they had overslept as they did not know what the time was)

I was gifted my first watch, by my parent when I was 8 years old. I used that same watch until I graduated high school. At this time an aunt gifted me another one. Yes, there was a generation, not so long ago, where watches were used for 10-20 years and more.

Now, there are kids watches like these: which are available so cheap, that I know many kids aged 6 and below who already have a collection of watches in various stages of disrepair.

There was a time when watches were like Jewellery. Carefully considered before buying, a long term investment and carefuly cared for.Sometimes watches had to be taken to jewellers for repair or for a battery to be replaced. So precious and delicate were its internal mechanisms. The trend still continues with diamond studded watches introduced by premium designers. Most big fashion labels, even lend their names to a watch line or two.

The watch is no longer a mechanism just to tell time. It has become an important fashion accessory.