My primary means of communication is through sms,e-mail and calls. This is applicable to a majority of us, we'd rather sms,e-mail and lastly resort to calls if we need instantaneous response. I can easily do sms and calls on my mobile phone but usually have to be near my Macbook or any PC terminal at the office or at home to check email. Even though we can check our emails nowadays on our mobile phone it's not as user friendly as sms. You can configure your phone to check your inbox at set intervals from every 5 mins or every hour and pulls e-mails from your inbox into your phone and notify you just like a new sms. Don't we wish we can get our emails straight to our mobile phone as soon as it arrives in our inbox without us checking, like a BlackBerry. Well now we can if you are using a Windows smart phone and subscribe to any of the paid or free push email providers. I have tried mobipush.com whereby I have configured it push email from my Google inbox. Caveat emptor, you have to pay for data every time you get an email push to you, hey nothing is free nowadays. What you have to do is find a data plan that works out to be rates that would be similar to an outgoing sms. So if you have lots of emails and wishes to respond to them on your mobile as well,I'd suggest you go for the data unlimited plan. After trying mobipush I find it to be unreliable, sometimes emails don't get push to my mobile so I switch to mail2web LIVE. the difference is that you have to to subscribe to a new webmail and configure your other emails to forward to this mail2web address. As soon as it goes into your inbox it will push it to your mobile,so far it has been reliable,I get emails faster than my inbox and best of all it's free. It's great because all my mode of communication can be on 1 single mobile device. There a few things lacking because I don't use active sync, MS outlook and I am using a Macbook so I cannot sync my calendar and contacts. Well The iPhone 3G do have similar offerings and that could be ny next Gadjet!
Last weekend I made a day trip to the Bako National Park. Thought I' d be lucky enough to shoot (photograph) the 'orang belanda' (Dutch people) as they are locally known or the Proboscis monkey which can be found only on the island of Borneo. The trip started with a 40 minutes drive from Kuching to the jetty point at Kampung Bako. From there you will take a 30 min boat ride to the park. Round trip boat fare was RM97 for 5 person. There were 2 ladies incidentally from Holland sharing the boat and they couldn't make out the joke asking if they were visiting relatives. Anyway it was about 8am when we set off the jetty and life jacket were provided and the boat slowed down due to the low tide and navigating through muddy waters. Once that was clear we headed to open choppy waters and can be quite harrowing and make sure you cover your equipment. Due to the low tide we were let off near the beach and you have take off your shoes and wade through shallow waters to get to Park HQ. Entrance is RM10 per adult and there are lodges if you wish to stay overnight. There are various trails to set off ranging from 30 mins to 7 hours trail. I set off on the Paku Trail to catch a glimpse of the monkeys. There were the Silver leaf langurs and common macaques. The 'orang belanda' were elusive and I manage to spot them along the trial but were too high up in the trees for good shots. The other types can be aggressive if they think you have food. The trails can be quite hard with lots of steeps inclines. Make sure you have good treking shoes and bring lots of water for you will be drenched in sweat. A broad brimmed jungle hat and trekking stick are recommended items to bring. I only brought my 70-200mm F4 L IS though sufficient longer lengths are recommended for birding or even a macro for other plant and insects shoot. I wished I planned for a longer stay and will bring more equiptment on my next trip to Bako National Park. Visit my album for more images.
