Lorraine and Champagne

I moved on to Loraine. This is a very nice Northern France province, rich in agriculture.Here you see me with the early Barley. The fields stretches for square miles!

The map on top of the hill where a big statue stood, it belongs to the church here.

Me, at the back of the church on a windy 6 deg C day, hazed down with cool smock, thanks to pollution and still air.

View from the hill, really liked the air here, the valley a little smog, but up here, its really good bros.

At the valley where the grains traditionally were stored in fortified barns where the feudal lords keep for their armies.

Me at the entrance of the church, which is normally a refugee centre in Medieval times during war times.

An Arty Farty shot.....not bad eh? See car breaking the law? Get the composition...story....what I was getting at???....oh, never mind.....art is the good marketing for a bad mistake anyway.

The town where they sell produce from the caves....mainly, wine and cheese!

Wind shield and areal map for this look out.

The statue, don't know what he is point about?

Trip To Champagne

The trip to Champagne was the most memorable, as its my second trip in 2 years. This time, we went to all the smaller routes without taking the A4 from Paris.

We went through potato fields where winter harvest was going on and visited several vineyards. Tatlinger, Moet Chandon and the most memorable is Castellane. This Champagne mixing plant has 16km dug out below them on tunnels and had sparkling wine dated back to 1642! They said they opened one for Napoleon, one for Charles De Gaul and recently to Mitterand...that is it, still got about 400 bottles to go, about 18,000 Euros a shot!

Here is one of the best moments, sampling a freshly pulled glass in the ambient temperatures of the tunnel itself, about 14 deg C! Nice, the tour guide also drink, he does a few tours a day! In a few years, he will patronise the Indian body parts market for a good stolen liver! At the rate he is going! Suicide!

See, here is one of those crazy bottles they use to christen their nuclear subs! Enough to drink 20 bulls under the table!

Castellane do not export their Champagne, 100% domestic sales only, that is 1.4 million bottles a year and 70% consumed in Paris. This is with the exception of it being used in Formula One races.

At the country side where they planted the vine yards. You can see them in rows in the background. This is the valley area, about 8 degrees C, not too cold, but you can see, I have a T shirt one, one pull over and one, spanking new rip off vest by Camel Active Wear that I was forced to buy in Rue De Rivoli in Paris due to sudden down turn of temperatures!

I like country side small towns like this one, they are not Frenchy like the fake Africans in Vous Vous Votre Paris! Shit crap! These are the real French people, loving, hospitable and very happy to see foreigners like me, they never saw any since they aren't in the tourist belt. Here I was just about to go to their local Bonbons to buy some nice deli and sweets over some coffee, albeit at under 50% the price you pay in Paris.

This is a Chinese Restaurant that served French Food! Its called the little chinese! What a surprise! A lot of truckers eat here. Just round the corner from Castellane on your way to the local Carrefour to stock up my groceries. In EU, you better have a good stove and cook or else, you pay top dollars for food that will make you sick! Home sick that is for this CINA BIANG!

Sweet country side with launch place for water sports like canoes and kayaks! Good place to live, nice and quite, can make a lot of models. Get the summer shrubs here in Autum for free, no need to buy Preiser!

Some see this as ARTY FARTY shot, I see it as a good supply of twigs to make Dioramas! Beauty in the beholder!

Another Arty Farty shot of the country side. I got off the car, walked through cold wet sod to get this shot, pity, its a little hazy for a good view. Photo did not do justice to the real thing, was really breathtaking. No Canon EOS can capture your 2 million MB eyeballs can, only lens and CMOS system made by God!

Waited for some time to get this shot. Ran to the middle and took this shot before kena nearly honked down by a trailer truck who wasn't happy. That chap must be from Paris, people down here are nice. I tried very hard to take a shot, yet a few cars stopped and asked if I wanted them to help me take a picture of me! Actually, I wanted them to leave me alone to have this shot taken! Imagine, the 504 thundered through here, must be very terrifying then! Some of the houses still had bullet holes in them!

Mercedes Technology Centre Lecture

Recently, was invited to Mercedes Technology Centre to give a lecture on new car body armour systems. This involves liquid ceramics, resin-less UD material through mechanical process treatment of fibres, NanoRepel flame retarding properties. Security is top secret, cannot even bring in hand phone! Only Photo can take is outside the building! Alamak....inside can see Pope wagon etc. We are working on new lightweight B6 and B7 armour systems.

Outside Mercedes Technology Centre in down town Sindelfingen, near Stuttgart.

This place outside my hotel in Winterbach serves very good original Blackforest cakes. 1 pc 2 Euros but 1 pound worth, not like our 7 Euros Hotel cakes, enough to stuff my front teeth gaps.
Drove from Paris, in Snow! on an Opel Meriva on Summer Tires! Looked like my old rally skills came in handy. Went with Hon Swee Sen's (late Minister) family member.

The New Mercedes Museum, opposite the old one, not far from Porsche Strasse where I went next and got a big cut on my eye brow! But got some free gifts in the end. Talk about blood gift! The red on those calipers were blood, nor paint! My blood that is!

Super Cruising high speed Mercedes One off!

Weird buildings of Dusseldorf

Dusseldolf, a city of weird mix of architecture, Never really got to post these pictures.

It is historic and yet it has its very industrial and weird face of fun. enjoy the pics

This is the church in the middle of the town square, according to my GPS system on the TOM TOM Go, its near the Rathaus, which is normally the town city hall.

This street party is for World Cup fever as this dates back to 2006! only 200 yards from the Church building where I took the above picture. Here we can buy swine hexan, all sorts of bread and sausages plus of course, lots of beer.

Then I remembered this place where a lot has been written about its funny looking buildings, Curve here, slope there.....an architectural showcase. Finally I got some one on the ferry while we are crossing the Rhine to tell us that its in Hammer Strasse. After some negotiating, we found this river bank, then the heavens opened up! Not after I took like 40 pictures! This one is a spiral building, an office block next to the bank, it is one of two identical buildings, one has a white finish while the next one is Chrome mirror finished.

Here we see the CHROMED mirror finished of polished stainless steel facade.

Then, there is this building with all the climbers outside it across the river. It sits next to a building that has a section jutting out and next to a dwarf which has a brick red unit next to it that has a weird triangular feature jutting out on the 4th floor on the river bank side.

The river bank taken from the glass bridge. Here we see WW2 type loaders on the banks and old warehouses amongst phenomenal modern architecture. The green building as restaurants in it.

This is also a strange building, it integrated the old building into the ultra modern office block, making it unique.

See, its pouring cats and dogs, but, heh..heh... my Touareg is park below this building which has a multi storey underground car park.

We can see the weird grey and glass building in the background!

Thoroughly enjoyed this escapade.

Citadel and kick ass plates South Carolina

My Customer, Eddie has decided to do a crazy thing, to make me stop work early and took me on his private jet and flew me over to South Carolina Charleston the historic place to a place called Charleston Grille, spent a few grand for dinner. It was first class all the way, Cadillac SUV waiting for us at the airport.

That is Mr. Loaded and his wife Karen in his gold plated jet.

This is Mark and Me, sitting looking pretty, Mark used to work for Spectra in Allied Signal, then 2nd Chance, Pointblank and now with my customer First Choice. He is VP International Business.

The town was really old school, some houses there are built before the Civil War. It was at Charleston where General Grant fired the first cannon shot that started the war. I visit Warren Buffet's holiday home there. Worth millions as everything in the house dates back to the civil war days and even the drive way still had oil lamps operating.

Pretty Beechcraft! Lovely plane, flies up to 55,000 ft and transonic I think. It was a 45 minute flight, spent $5800 on fuel, plus others, like car, landing rights, pilot allowances, which he had two on permanent staff since he lived all over the east coast.

That is me exiting the Beechcraft Jet at Charleston. Enroute to dinner, we stopped by a place like West Point, however, this military college ran classes for all 3 services. Its called the Citadel and their ceremonial dress still had the Civil War confederate uniforms of the grey. Interesting place.

This is the Historic Charleston Place, where we ate, the car on the right is ours. Bloody dinner for 4 was close to US$900!

That is my salad, the Boston Lobster with Crysanthemum and Chives in a Cordon Blue Sauce.

Here I stand in front of the M4 Sherman, the shit tank that won the war by sheer numbers. At Citadel.

The rotors that owned the nights and days, the almight AH1H Cobra! This one is armed with 8 TOWs, a minigun, a 20mm cannon and 2 rocket pods!

F4C, the USAF jet that owned the skies over Vietnam. Me and Eddie.

The size of the Amtrac is amazing! I only knew it in 35th scale.

Money in the making. Our submission, for $70 million tender.

Our Kick Ass 15kg/m2 Polyethylene plate that stops SS109. 10 shots including 2 shots from the edge.

Floating Armour System

Just designed a kick-ass Armour package which can be used for the military. It floats! The plate floats as well! The whole damn vest floats and weighs about 10 pounds including 2 plates in large size!

The V50 failure point for 9mm is way above the 1750 ft/sec mark......a good 150 ft/sec above the requirements. Plus, the areal density of less than 1 pound per sq foot, its damn light.

Very proud and hope we see ship loads of this no kidding design!

Also, we were able to stop the 30.06 Tungsten Penetrator bullet with 2 pcs of 3mm steel and our PE plate! Ultra cheap solution for STANAG 2 protection.

Happy about this!

Shooting kick ass designs

CHO KANG ARGGGHHHH!!! KWEE TIAM LIAO!!!!!!!

First Day alarm radio came on at 6 am! Brush up, clean up, actually, nothing to clean except shave, brush etc since my ass was almost frozen off!

Anyway, since paid for water, bath lah! As usual with winter showers, have to figure out the fine line between getting our ass cooked and that of being part of the chilled fish lot going off to Japan for Sashimi!

I hate breakfast at the Holiday Inn. It has got only cereals, frozen eggs....yes! FROZEN EGGS!, coffee that is 1kg make 1 swimming pool type, and 7 types of sweetner and 6 types of creamer to pretend that you are drinking something sophisticated!

Well, two whips from that cold cereals, that is it! I am off to Denny's to get something closer to body temperature!

At Denny's, breakfast sandwich came with ham, coleslaw, eggs sunny side up, sweet tea (our iced lemon tea), hashbrowns and 4 pan cakes! 2kg of food for 6.99! But must tip, so kena $9 USD! Not like our $1.50 USD good ol' Laksa back home!

At the office, now work starts for our kick ass floating armour! Now, let see......hmmm, why we got so many ammo types in a few cupboard is something I am still figuring out. It is always nice to meet Mike again, our shooter. Works kind of not very motivated. So took him for killer 18" medium sized Hawaiian Pizza with Championon Mushrooms, Hardee's, Dragon Village etc to cheer him up.

First up, we got some shields to design....man, the exisitng ones, boy! are they heavy! So, we wipe some NanoRepel into the Twaron T750s and we got the layer counts from 24 down to 14! That is almost a 40% reduction in materials and 50 drop in labour cost since now we have a prepreg and need not pay the guys to lay up the glue sheets in between layers anymore! The boss is really happy. Stops the Magnum 44, 357 SIG, 9mm +P+. For me, I am just happy to be able to sell more chemicals.

Here you can see the difference NanoRepel makes. On the left, it is Mag 44 JHP on a pack with 6 layers of NanoRepel Prepreged Twaron CT709s and the left is one with the same pack with one of the NanoRepels replaced with the new Honeywell Spectra Shield II material. The energy signature of this phase change material is clear.

Then its time to take out the nasty stuff. Tokarev. The one in the fore ground is the ball round that can be fired from the pistol, the clip on the background is what you can get from Czech or Cambodia for $5. Those are kick ass steel bullet jacketed! Shoots right through level IIIA armour and a double shot within 1 inch from each other will shot through the level III plate, except ours! Heh heh heh

Then we have some experiments with ultra lightweight armour concepts which I thought Mike to look out for. The science is new to the customer, but their CTO is very how lian, so I taught him nothing. Heh Heh...Since he How Lian, let him be How Tai then.