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Today’s news in theStar had me shocked for a moment. It’s a pity that the boy was burnt while his father was refueling the gas tank. But there’s more to it.

“My engine was off, I was not using my mobile phone and I was not smoking.” said the father.

The petrol station investigated the matter and claimed the fire was due to static charge, or commonly known as static electricity. it’s a rare case but it still will. It does not mean that you will be safe while refueling your vehicle with the engine off, mobile phone turned off and not smoking. You still have to take care of one more factor, static charge.

Static Charge
Static electricity is an electric charge caused by an imbalance of electrons on the surface of a material. This normally occurs by the contact and separation of materials. You are unable to see the charge as it’s an invincible force, but you should have felt it before in your life, or get a feel of it before. Try touching the panel of a Cathode Ray Tubed television after it’s off with your hair or hairy hands and you’ll get the feel of static electric.

Factors Causing Static Charge
There are various factors which contributes to generation of static charge. Dr. Jesse Laprade, an Extension envirionmental specialist said this,

“Static electricity can build up when a person exits and re-enters a vehicle, particularly in cool or cold and dry conditions. When you exit and re-enter your vehicle while refueling, there is the potential for sufficient static electricity to build up that a spark can discharge between your body and the fuel nozzle. In rare circumstances, the spark can ignite gasoline vapors around the fill spout, causing a brief flash fire.”

Consider common situation where we refuel our vehicles,

A person parks his car at the pump station, opened the car door, rubbed against the car seat while getting out of car, unscrew the fuel tank cover, touched the fuel nozzle and maybe swipe a few cards before inserting the nozzle into the fuel tank. The person then leaves the pump nozzle attached to the fuel tank and gets into the car while waiting for the refueling process to end. After that, he gets out of the car and removes the pump nozzle and puts it back into the pump station.

Static charges that were picked up by the person before the fuel nozzle is attached to the the fuel tank were dissipated few times, thus reducing the amount of static charges collected. However, the problem lies after the person got into the vehicle while refueling. Whenever you get out of the vehicle the second time, new static charges are picked up and they not dissipated yet. If you do not discharge yourself by touching metal stuffs before touching the nozzle, chances are that static charges which are not dissipated will then be transferred to the nozzle, thus having a potential of changing your nozzle into a flame thrower.

Fuel pump stations and the vehicle are already grounded, and the touching of the fuel tank caps and metal body before refueling discharges your body from static charges. However, we seldom realize that we are picking up new static charges while rubbing against the car seats.

Prevention Rather Than Regret
Preventing static charges from causing a tragic fuel refueling process is not very hard. You can refuel a portable fuel container which is placed on the ground rather than the fuel tank to allow electrical charges to escape easily. Do not re-enter a car while it’s refueling. If there’s a real need for it, discharge yourself by touching something metal like the vehicle door before touching the nozzle again. This applies to people surrounding you too. Remember to keep your children safe and make sure they do not play in the car while refueling as rubbing around the car seats creates static electricity too.

Remember, static charge can kill if you do not handle safety well and end up like this.

Enjoy this video created by my friend, AhFu back in year 2004. It features a self rendered Gundam. The whole video took him 1 month if I’m not mistaken. Watching it again and again still could not get me to feel bored, that’s because it’s totally 4 minutes plus of action packed in it. He told me of a H.264 version which he’s going to encode it soon, I’ll post it up when it’s done. Meanwhile enjoy this youtube version first.

I’m a fan of Gundam series as the producers always incorporate human versus super human races into a deadlock war among the races. And the fictional technologies spawned from the developer’s mind are always astonishing.

PC Fair is around the corner, 7th to 9th December 2007 to be exact. I know I already got a new rig set some 11 months ago, but that rig is at home and I’m using a 3 years old computer here at my place. Hence the need to crack my head for some upgrades to let it live through another few years of computing age.

This 3 year old computer sports:

• Intel Pentium 4 2.5GHz processor
• Intel D865PERL board
• 1.5GB Kingston PC 3200 DDR Ram (2×256mb and 1×1GB)
• Asus V9520 Magic-T (Nvidia FX5200)
• 80GB Maxtor hard disk
• 8.4GB Fujitsu hard disk (I know it’s damn old, but it has no bad sector after these 7 years)
• Creative Sound Blaster Live! Value sound card
• Phillips 107S5 17″ CRT monitor (Flat screen)
• Altec Lansing ACS295 2.1 speaker set (Ancient, but still crystal clear)
• Lite-on CD-RW drive
• Lite-on DVD-ROM drive

Back then while I was initially using Windows Vista on this computer, the O/S consumes alot of memory and I’d smoothen it with an additional 1GB of RAM. With it, basic document editing, surfing, leisure non graphic demanding games are playable on this rig set (I manage to run Heroes V on very low settings).

However, you get to feel the sluggishness when you start up graphic card demanding softwares, Photoshop renders slow, RPG and RTS games after Year 2006 are unplayable on decent video quality, partially due to Windows Vista itself is also pretty GPU demanding.

The reason I did not fall back to Windows XP is that, we will all move on to Windows Vista in due time, just a matter of time. Instead of holding back on old softwares, I might as well spend some bucks and get my rig usable for say, another 2 years? 3 years?

I did not resort to use other operating system like Ubuntu, gOS because it just don’t work in my environment of living here at all. Running Ubuntu and gOS will simply render my computer without a proper wireless network connectivity which I need it for internet access. Besides this, friends of mine will not somehow adapt to Ubuntu or other Linux Distros as it’s complicated for them.

So I came up with the most important thing to get for this PC Fair, Asus or Sapphire ATi X2600 Pro graphic card. This is the only card which I saw supporting AGP slot, and there’s been some saying that Geforce 8 simply doesn’t work on AGP slot. ATi X2600 Pro supports the latest Shader 4.0 of Direct X 10, and will eventually be able to support up to Direct X 10.1

My thinking is that, there’s no point in getting something supporting up to Direct X 9 right now since you’re expecting to use it for the next 2 to 3 years at least. With Windows Vista going de facto standard in few years more, it would be a right choice to get a card supporting Direct X 10 at least.

Guess I’ll only need to change my graphic card as changing the rest of the components will cost as much as getting a new computer, therefore rendering the objective of upgrading a computer.

Some of you might remembered my long forgotten blog, I almost did. While organizing my files the other day, I came across my blog’s database backup and it struck me, “How long was it since I actually blogged?” 3 months? 6 months?

So I fired the database up and the last post that I blogged was dated 11th October 2006. I’ve decided to continue my blog and much of the old posts will be retained here. Meanwhile I’ll be spitting my brain’s thoughts into this digital world, hence the new title of my blog “Copying Brain Electro Waves to Digital Storage”.

Unlike before where I talk more on life, I’ll be going more towards issues surrounding my life. We all have our points of view on a certain matter, while you keep yours to yourself, I decided to share mine on my blog, and I don’t mind you sharing or rebuke my thoughts here. Just please do it in a civil manner.

On a side note, I’m working on another website on digital technology at www.7hirst.com. If you’re an avid fans of technology, or just loves to learn more tricks and how-to on internet applications, feel free to go over and visit the website.