Friday afternoon

After putting off running the “run 40mins, walk 1min, run 20mins” session for the past 3 days, I knew I had to go for the run soon. As I looked out my window, I saw small groups of runners out on the cross-country course. And it wasn’t just one group of runners but many small groups all over the place. I quickly checked the university’s sports website and found out that there’s going to be the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Mid-Atlantic Cross-country Race taking place at Lehigh on Saturday. Since there’s going to be an official race on Saturday, I couldn’t put off my run till Saturday, so reluctantly I went out for my run.

There were all these student athlete runners on the trail…very intimidating. So I went to do most of my run on the track but 40 minutes of round and round the track was absolutely boring. Eventually, towards the end of my run, I ventured on the cross-country trail and finished my run there.

Saturday morning

The big race for the many of the runners who were out on the course yesterday for their practice run. I was in my room and I heard some commotion outside. I quickly took my camera and started recording the race from my window. Now you can see the video and know that the cross-country course is REALLY near my apartment.

I was surfing the web on November 10 early early in the morning (US eastern time) trying to find updates regarding the BERSIH rally. I am so used to the relentless media coverage of big events in the US….updates every few minutes, aerial view, ground view, journalists at ground zero…it was frustrating to not see, read or hear anything. Local media couldn’t cover the event, Malaysian bloggers were either out joining the rally, or they were in faced with the same local media blackout, foreign media’s coverage was not extensive or fast enough. I wanted to see what was happening and in some ways be part of it.

Finally, I met Victor online and he pointed me to KL City Hall Urban Transportation Department’s website. They have live traffic cams all over the city. After trial and error searching through the different camera views, we finally found one that focused on Jalan Damansara/Jalan Tun Sambathan with a view of Istana Negara. At first, there wasn’t anything much to see, then slowly the still images showed people arriving at the Istana. Then the camera started zooming in (I guess the people at the Dept manning the camera and the website also wanted to see what was happening). It was great watching it all live. After watching the still images for a while, I realized that most people would not have the chance to see the rally from this view. I tried to download the pictures but that didn’t work. So I used my high tech equipments to do the lowest tech thing – I used my digital camera to take pictures of the still images on my macbook screen and uploaded the pictures to the macbook and uploaded again to Flickr. Meanwhile Victor also emailed me some still images that he captured in a more techy way. Go here to view these still images.

Bersih.
Free and fair elections.
What’s wrong with wanting that?

I was reluctant to record videos of the concert. During last year’s Third Day concert, the videos came out horrible. However since I have a new camera, I decided to give it a go. The videos came out pretty well. But this time I had to do a bit more volunteer work, so I didn’t manage to capture some of the signature songs.

World Vision volunteers in orange

Once again, I volunteered for World Vision. In addition to attending the Casting Crowns concert for free, I even got a free bright orange t-shirt that says “World Vision Volunteer”. According to the WV person-in-charge, in a concert of 5000 people, WV expects to get at least 3% of the concert goers to sponsor a child, that means by the end of the concert at least 150 children will be sponsored. Child sponsorship cost $30 a month. And if the person pays by credit card, s/he even gets the Lifestories book and Casting Crowns’ latest CD free. As I was looking through the stack of folders of kids born in February, I found a girl in Indonesia who was born on February 25. For a moment, I even considered sponsoring her but recognizing my financially limited status, I decided to skip it.