The application works flawlessly in terms of exporting the model to a .KMZ file, or directly into Google Earth (you have to make sure it is running first). I’m hoping to see in near future we can export the models created in Google SketchUp into other formats outside of the Google’s realm. Anyway, you can also directly save a screen capture of the current view for quick distribution:

Now comes the fun part: When you’re done creating your 3D models, export it into Google Earth and/or share it with the world!

For your info, you can also use Google SketchUp to model things other than building or structures. You may take a look at the Google’s 3D Warehouse community site to see how others are modelling their imaginations.

All you need to do is to register yourself an account, select which tools you want on your toolbar, you will have it installed and running on your browser within 5 minutes. The tools offered ranges from various famous search engines, RSS news ticker, quick URL links to your favourite sites, email checker, RSS reader, online radio player with your choice of stations, web chatting interface, weather forecast for your location, pop-up blocker, and many more. They even have a customizing area for webmasters to write their own tools.

Besides just creating your own toolbar, they have also have free banners for you to advertise your own toolbar!

Their support forum is very helpful and lots of people have published their own codes for additional features such as Page Rank detection from Google, Traffic Rank from Alexa, and many more. Once you’ve done creating your toolbar, you’ll be given a free permanent link to download your toolbar from - you can even place that link on your website to market your toolbar to other web surfers encouraging them to download and install your toolbar.

So if you’re a webmaster and want to improve your blog/forum/website/portal, a custom toolbar would certainly help to bring back your loyal readers and improve your virtual community.

Anyway, in those past few months of relying on feeds, I’ve stumbled across numerous interesting things:

Such as web users utilizing sites like FeedBurner, Technorati, and del.icio.us to help them maintain their favourite individual feeds online - I’m not that keen because they don’t offer downloadable feeds and sometimes it takes too long to load your bookmarks;

Scraping services from the likes of Moreover.com that browse through news sites which doesn’t offer feeds, but intelligent enough to extract the information from their HTML pages and converting it into a feed. Personally I’m using their free services to grab all the latest news back at home because some of the good local news sites which I normally surf to doesn’t offer feeds - which is a real shame;

Sites providing feeds compiling such as FeedJumbler.com which does it quite effectively for me by compiling feeds from various bloggers’ site for the Miricom Bloggers Digest I’ve setup at MiriCommunity.net - except for problems on sites not using English. It takes awhile for it to do the compiling, therefore it is recommended for any webmasters to create a cache of the compiled results if you don’t want to cause delays in your page loads. Alternatively you may try installing Magpie RSS Parser on your webserver running on PHP and do it yourself by running a scheduled cronjob, but I find it having problems with certain formats such as feeds from Xanga.com - that was weeks ago, who knows they have fixed the problem by now;

Browser toolbar which has built-in feed reader such as the Miricom Toolbar I’ve created using the free services from EffectiveBrand.com for MiriCommunity.net. It’s an impressive little feature which allows users to select what feeds they want their toolbar to grab. But currently I’ve limited it to a single feed coming from the MiriCommunity.net forums because not certain whether it can tolerate other format of feeds yet.

So there you go. Hopefully this information is valuable for webmasters and web developers out there to remember that feeds are a growing trend of a new breed. If your site doesn’t offer it, then you’ll never be able to reach more readers out there.

In my mind, RSS works like a sitemap you normally see in websites. The only difference is, it stores the links in XML format (which is a standard data format), and maintains/limits the list to most latests topics only. Websites which you’ll normally see RSS made available are like blogs, news sites, etc. - which constantly churns out lots of new contents daily. Typically in order to keep up with the latest topics from your favourite sites, you’ll just fire-up your browser, go to the site, and read what’s new on the main page in hoping you didn’t miss out on something important for the past few days. You will perform the same procedure on other favourite sites too - which is apparently a strenuous task just to find & read all the interesting topics which you have missed out since the last time you were there. Wouldn’t it be great if an application can download all the latest topics from all your favourite sites and keep it in store for you to read them later? Well, that’s where RSS comes into play: to streamline your online needs.

I’m using Thunderbird as the offline RSS reader for my favourite list of RSS sources. Here’s a screen capture of how it looks like:

There are also other free RSS web readers out there which you can subscribe to:

www.feedburner.com

www.feedster.com

www.newsgator.com

The shockwave movie can be viewed here (note: it’s about 5 mb of download). Requires Director Shockwave to play, but if you don’t have it installed, it will notify you to download it. Please also note that I didn’t include the support movie files because they are huge, but it’s still playable.

If you want to have a look at the working file (without the huge embedded support movie files), you can go here to view it (Note: it’s about 4 MB of download). You might need to download the latest Director Shockwave player in order to view the movie. Don’t worry, if the movie can’t play, it will prompt you to download the player. If you want to see the full working projector file meant for CD distribution, drop me a message and I’ll make the effort to upload the 100MB file for you to patiently download.

When we reached Kuala Kedah (and old sleepy town) at about 6:30am, had to wait till about 7am for the terminal to open. So we had breakfast at this small & typical chinese cafe shop which happens to be opened at that time. Some families were already there having their breakfast in hoping to catch the first ferry across to Langkawi so that a day’s worth of enjoyment is not wasted. By the time we were done with breakfast, we already missed the first ferry. So we waited a little, and entertained the toutings of a travel guide promoting his “one-off-super-package” tailored for our 2 nights 3 days trip. There we were sucking in all the imaginable fun described by him in a sleepy state of mind. In the end, he got us hooked and we paid for the programmes because of the time we’ll save for hunting down resorts and tour guides for island hopping. After signing some insurance papers and acquired the contact details, we climbed into the express boat and waited eagerly for another hour before arriving in Langkawi.

When we arrived in Langkawi, we disembarked the boat with our belongings and started to walk towards the huge and busy terminal. The place is jam-packed with people coming and going at the same time. Outside the terminal, it’s even worst: tour groups hang about waiting for someone (hopefully not the missing tour guides with all their monies!), people waiting for their ferries, and touting taxi drivers! (reminded me of KLIA’s arriving hall). The facade of the terminal sure improved a lot since the last time I went there in 1998. Anyway, when we found the booth we were told to look for, the people there told us to take their assigned taxi van to get us to Langkapuri Resort. While plaqued with fatigueness, I was able to take a few snaps from within the van. Couldn’t take a picture of the eagle monument, but a picture of its back is good enough for me as you can see below.

Once we arrived at the resort, the view was rather strange to me. Their open-air “lobby” was in fact the car park garage area of a typical single-storey bungalow! The receptionist sits behind an old counter decorated with nothing but a few pens and log book. The ceiling fan was not working at full blast to cool us down in the heat of the island early that morning, and the sitting area consists of donated sofas. It was a pitiful sight, but it was a unique and fun experience too. We were told we couldn’t check into our chalets yet because check-in times are at noon. So, we changed into our swimming gear, and off to the clean beach for a morning dip! We really had a nice time playing in the cool sea water, and feasting our eyes on the beautiful evironment which you don’t see often anymore. After a few hours and a few big gulps of the sea water, we decided to get lunch. Off we walked to the nearby shops, but they weren’t open yet. So we walked a little bit more and guess what? We arrived at the Water World. We didn’t fancy the Water World because that’s not what we want to see. So we quickly have our expensive lunch at the fast food restaurant near by, and dashed back to our chalets in the rain to quickly get ready for the activities ahead!

When our guide arrives, he drove us using his van to the beach side where we will get on a speedboat for the island hopping experience. I have no idea where the location is, but it is right next to one of the government vacation apartments. Anyway, got onto the speedboat, and headed to the first island: Pulau Dayang Bunting (Pregnant Maiden Island). In the pictures below, you will see why it is named that way.

Next, the eagle-feeding island! When we arrived at the spot, we saw lots of eagles circling high about in the air. We didn’t get off the speedboat for this island. The guide threw some chicken organs into the sea and told us to watch (my camera wasn’t ready then because I didn’t know what he was trying to do). Then suddenly, the eagles each started to dive down onto the surface of the water in a swift scoop and grab the tossed organs. We requested the guide to toss another round of organs to allow us to take some pictures. Darned birds, why can’t they fly slower! My digital camera is not fast enough to take a good snap!

Lastly, we arrived at the Pulau Beras Basah (Wet Paddy Island) and we were given permission to take a swim at the beach. The sea water is clear and you can actually see your feet at the bottom of the sea. It’s a nice beach, but have to be very careful of sharp broken corals washed up ashore. And also be watchfull of those pesky sea urchin - Oly got stung by one when she was just about to enjoy the water. After that accident, all other tourists panic and got out of the water for fear of getting the same fate. If you have no visual idea what it looks like, imagine a little black-icky slug with lots of 10 inches spikes all over it!

When we got back onto the boat, we were told that is all for this island hopping trip. Being tired and exhausted, we were all a little sad and silent knowing what we have just experienced which is something that could only come once in blue moon. But that was just temporarily, you haven’t seen what we did at the resort’s beach bar that evening!

We were sober and ready early the next morning for the snorkelling trip at Coral Island. “Bright eye and bushy tail” as some may say. Guide arrived and brought us to the Langkawi Jetty (which we arrived in earlier). Boarded a huge crew boat with lots of other people taking up the same programme as us. After an one half hour ride, we arrive at Coral Island. Got off the boat, find ourselve a spot at the beach, and get suited up for some snorkelling!

6 hours later, it was time to go back to the main island. Weather was bad, and that big crew vessel was not giving everyone a good time on board - Ryna got really sea sick. The final evening in Langkawi was dull because all of us were dead tired. So we had a quick night cap at the beach bar before calling it quits by 2am.

The return trip back to KL in the next morning was a real blur for me. I remember we checked-out from Langkapuri Resort, and then walking into the house in KL - everything else in between was somehow lost in transition with no recollection at all. I suppose I was sleeping all the way. A word of advise for people going to Langkawi for the first time: Only rent a car for a day (because land attraction lacks of attention span), bring lots of cash (I was told the only ATM machine is in the Airport!), cheap resorts doesn’t accept credit cards (go figure), and lastly don’t swim in the sea at night (I was told that stingrays are a little bit more hostile and hungrier at night :-)).

And the food served onboard is just superb! My guess is that COPI must have used their own catering services to accomodate the expected quality of services which their high-paying staffs are used to. Anyway, as the plane starts decending in to the Matak Airstrip, I was already starting to enjoy myself on the sight of the beautiful islands surrounding the place. Once got out of the plane, I was shaken from the daze because people are starting to rush around to quickly get things done. I know I have a job to do, and this is my once-in-a-lifetime chance of ever possible reaching to these corporate-protected islands. Only managed to take a few pictures as we all rush around to find the first boat to perform installation.

First thing that were told to do was to check-in to our quaters and be on stand-by. The quaters are of good normal standards (e.g. warm shower, air-conditioned) and their camp services (e.g. laundry cleaning, canteen) are great. I was starting to feel a little too pampered by all these good & free services which COPI gives its staffs.

Anyway, as days progresses, we finally got the job done and were able to take a few more pictures of the peaceful Matak island.

Then on the last day, when the realization of having to leave the island dawned on us, it was very sad to say the least. The place was a peaceful haven (e.g. no cars, forest all around, far from civilization), and will obviously be deprived from all of these once we get back to the real world.