But when I tell people I drive a Prius, I get a sneer and look that suggest I must be a bumbling idiot, you know the one where their face wrinkles up near the nose. People ask the usual mileage questions (5Liters/100km if you’re curious), and make some oft-remark about the design–but then they end with the question that’s really a statement–isn’t it slow?

The Prius can easily top 110km/hour and still get better mileage than the much smaller Ford Fiesta. There isn’t a single highway in this country where you can legally do more than 110km/hours and hence  any car that can do 110km/hour can’t be slow.

So why is it, that people make such a fuss that an Ookla study concluded that our average broadband speed is slower than Cambodia–when the average of 5.48Mbits/second is still fast enough for every online service imaginable.

I’m a tech geek, and I’m happy with my 5Mbps connection from Unifi.

At 5Mbps, I can download content faster than I can watch it–anything faster is excessive.I can watch Netflix in HD (maybe not 1080p, but good enough), I can watch youtube without lags and I can listen to any podcast, radio channel or spotify without a hitch.

And I wouldn’t enjoy these services more even if I had a 10Mbps or 100Mbps connection. Trust me 5Mbps is fine.

So what’s the big deal with the connection speeds, that our friends over at the MCMC had to release an official statement. There are some issues with broadband in Malaysia, but speed isn’t one of them. Here are the top 4 things we can do to improve broadband in Malaysia which doesn’t include speed.

1. Fill a glass half-full with water
2. Drop a couple of ice-cubes into the glass
3. Measure the water level before the ice melts
4. Measure the water level after the ice melts

Now compare the water level before and after the ice melted, and you’ll find them to be the same. So if melting ice doesn’t increase the water level in your glass–why do melting ice-caps raise the sea-levels of the earth?

We are all a single species, all of us share a common DNA, so common that if yours changed by a mere 2% you’d be a chimpanzee.

We share one atmosphere, from which we breath the same air–not just with other humans alive today, but those of past times as well. In fact, every breath you take contains a slither of air from the breadth of everyone else–who has ever lived. I stand in awe, when I realize the air in my lungs now was also in the lungs of Julius Caesar as he was stabbed to death.

"House of Cards is really big in India, I discovered," Spacey told reporters at the International Indian Film Academy Awards which took place in Tampa, Floria – the first time they’ve been held in America. "Except isn't it funny that Netflix doesn't exist there yet. Which means that you're stealing it.”

I’m gonna be honest here. Kevin Spacey is one of my all time favorite actors, from his brilliant work in Usual Suspects and American Beauty, to his legendary performance in the House of Cards series–this guy can do no wrong.

This is how fast your connection on AWS in Singapore is when connecting to a Singaporean server. Not much different if you repeat it, but I was surprised the ping was still 2ms, I expected to be just 1 (or even less).

WTF is a bitcoin? There’s much ado over the digital currency and many people struggle to understand what it is. In fact, even I haven’t fully grasped the fundamental nature of how it works–but then again I don’t know how the banking and fiat currency system work, yet I still use it.

In essence, there’s been a huge amount of really technical literature written about bitcoin, but most of it is long–really long, and unless you’re prepared to spend a few hours and some mind-numbing amount of effort to digest it, I took it upon myself to distil my knowledge of bitcoin so that you have at least a working knowledge of it.

So here’s bitcoin explained.

Don't think of it as a currency

On the other hand we have precious commodities like Gold. Gold isn’t regulated by any one central government or bank. The value of Gold is purely a result of the supply and demand in the marketplace, and just like any other precious commodity, part of that value lies it is rarity. It’s rare, and mining it is complex business, so the supply of Gold into the market is controlled by natural consequences.

Gold is valueable because it has value–a currency is valuable because a government says so.

So the best way to think of bitcoin is to treat it as digital gold rather than digital currency.

Well maybe that’s an exaggeration, it’s actually 2 minutes and 1 second!

Let’s first take a step back, and understand how and Internet Service Provider (ISP) like Telekom Malaysia, Maxis or Digi operate.

Edweek.org further explains:

The assessment, which was the subject of an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development  (OECD) report released Tuesday, defined creative problem-solving as the ability to “understand and resolve problem situations where a method of solution is not immediately obvious.” Worldwide, a representative sample of 85,000 students took the exam, including 1,273 U.S. students in 162 schools.

As our thoughts and prayers remain with the passengers of flight MH370, I think that as the search enters its 3rd week, it’s a good time to reflect on just how much our perception of aviation technology has changed as a result.

It’s quite important to differentiate between what REALLY happens and what we THINK happens, an in some cases the gulf is so large, that our perception of what happens borders on science-fiction. Take for example, our perception of the US Secret Service. Years of Hollywood movies have led us to believe that if anyone even thought about firing a weapon at the President, Secret Service agents would immediately throw their bodies in the line of fire, evacuate the President and then take out the bad guy. That however is mere fairy tale–no different from the Giant Robots in Transformers or the Aliens in Star Wars. If you look at History and reality, you’d find that some years back, an Iraqi Gentleman not only had the time to throw a shoe at President Bush, but enough time to TAKE OUT A SECOND SHOE and throw it again at the President–were it not for the Presidents quick reflexes, he would have ended looking like David Beckham after a night out with Ferguson.

So the gulf between what we think the Secret Service CAN do, and what it ACTUALLY does, is quite enormous.