For such a wonderful dive site you would expect premium prices, but Sipadan is surprisingly accessible for those on a shoestring budget. Get yourself to Kuala Lumpur or Singapore and follow the tips below for a unforgettable dive holiday without breaking the bank.

Book your international flight to Kuala Lumpur or Singapore and then get yourself to Semporna via Tawau.

How to get from Kuala Lumpur to Tawau

Book a flight from KL to Tawau with Air Asia for around RM200 plus taxes.

Air Asia leaves from the Kuala Lumpur LCCT which stands for Low Cost Carrier Terminal. Its about 10km from the main international terminals. Follow the signs from arrivals to the car park and you will find the bus station and a transfer bus for RM1.50. It takes around 15 mins but leave some time to spare.

Air Asia are very strict about excess baggage and its expensive but they are very friendly to scuba divers. Pack your gear separately and identify it when you check in and you will pay maximum of RM30.

How to get from Singapore to Tawau

Book a flight from Johor Bahru to Tawau with Air Asia for around RM200 plus taxes.

Johor Bahru is the Malaysian town across the causeway from Singapore. After you land, take the train into town and then a bus from Queen Street bus station to Malaysia! Total cost less than S$5. You will need to get a taxi to Johor Bahru airport (also called Senai airport) because the buses are difficult to find but this should only cost you RM20 or so.

How to get from Tawau to Semporna

All day boats to Sipadan and transfers to Mabul resorts start in Semporna, a fishing town 100km from Tawau. The diving day and resort transfers start early so it is better to go direct to Semporna when you arrive.

Leaving Tawau airport you have two options. The bus ticket counter will sell you a ticket to Tawau (RM10) and direct you to the bus behind the police station. Tawau town is 30km from the airport south. Semporna is 70km north. If you go to Tawau first you will have to retrace 30km on your second bus before getting closer to your destination.

So before you buy your ticket to Tawau, go and look behind the police station. You will likely find a mini bus going direct to Semporna and they charge only RM20. Save yourself two hours and RM20 and go direct!

If you are tired, late or fancy splashing out, a taxi costs around RM100 and will fit up to 3 tired divers and their gear!

You could save yourself all that hassle by booking diving ahead. Most dive resorts will come and collect you if you book ahead.

So, when you get to Semporna what are your options to dive on Sipadan? Surprisingly you can do day trips from Semporna or stay on an island resort for much the same price so you choose for other reasons.

If you want to enjoy the relative freedom of staying the mainland so you can go shopping and choose your restaurant in the evening then your cost is longer boat times to the days diving. If you want to get away and take advantage of unlimited diving and short boat trips then you must book several consecutive diving days and stay all-in on an island resort.

Staying in Semporna and having day trips

Scuba Junkies are probably the largest day tripper from Semporna (website offline at publication date). For smaller boat groups you might try Blue Sea Divers who opened this summer and are a couple of doors down the road.

Staying on the island resorts

Many of the resorts on Mabul and Kapalai are expensive but there are budget options. The cheapest is definitely Uncle Chang’s Sipadan Mabul Dive Lodge. It’s very basic, mattresses on the floor and shared bathing but you go to the islands for the diving and the resort for rum party evenings not to catch up on your sleep.

For a little more money you could try something totally different and take a room on the converted oil rig called SeaVentures. This offers you the opportunity for unlimited diving under the rig with your buddy which makes it all great value. You also have more chance of getting some sleep on the rig!

Staying in Semporna

Whether its one night before a resort transfer or several days and day trip diving, your best option in Semporna is Scuba Junkies backpackers lodge. They have beds for as little as RM20 per night and that includes breakfast.

You might be tempted to go a little upmarket to City Inn or Dragon Inn hotels where you will an ensuite room but watch out, these do not include breakfast nor offer any refreshment services at all.

Sipadan is not the only diving destination in Sabah. Why not spend a few days in the state capital and discover the Tunku Abdul Rahman Marine Park just half an hour from the town jetty.

Kota Kinabalu is a very easy town to spend a few days in. There are many backpackers but for sure the classiest is Velvet which opened early 2007. The rooms are immaculate and they offer free use of the washing machine! You can go white water rafting, submerge yourself in sulphur baths or for the more adventurous you can climb the mountain.

T.A.R. marine park has a range of diving including several artificial reefs close to the islands which are very successful in attracting a range of fish. You can see some spectacular marine life even when the visibility is low when compared to Sipadan. While several dive centers operate in Kota Kinabalu, we found the customer service of Sabah Divers to be second to none and at a very good price.

As a supporter of Green living, you carry out your life in an eco-friendly and responsible manner, an attempt to minimize the size of your ecological footprint. Green living includes the conservation of resources, recycling, sustainability, green construction, alternative energy, organic food choices and other environmental topics.

Green Lifestyle – Each choice you make requires a consideration of the consequences of the choice, and the way that the decision will affect the environment and all living things within it. Ecological consciousness and care for the earth are of paramount importance in the decision-making process.By minimizing their “ecological footprints” – the extent to which they create an environmental impact, proponents of green living hope to preserve the earth for future generations of human beings and other life.

Green Technology – Green technology is essential for the conservation of energy, soil health, green building, environmentally preferred purchasing, green chemistry and green nanotechnology.Developing green technology includes toxic-waste-eating trees, smart electricity grids and floating environmental sensors. Then there is the alternative-energy home fueling station that could jump-start the long-awaited hydrogen economy. This technology may seem far out-but it will probably be here a lot sooner than we think.

Green Building – Green building is basically the practice of using eco-friendly building materials and designing homes and offices to be more energy efficient.A zero-energy building has no net energy consumption when measured across a year’s time. It uses alternative energy sources like solar and wind power. Both zero- and low-energy buildings are great for green living.

Green Energy – Green technologist aims produce energy without burning all the world’s coal and using all the world’s fossil fuels and natural resources. Alternative energy is related to green living as it includes energy alternatives to traditional fossil fuels. The main drive behind alternative energy is to find renewable, eco-friendly sources of energy like solar or wind power.

Organic Food – Organic food refers to food items that are produced, processed and packaged without using chemicals. Organic food is increasingly becoming popular due to its perceived health benefits over conventional food. Droves of people are turning to organic produce as a way to feel safer about the foods they eat. People are worried about the foods they put into their bodies. With all of the reports of food poisoning from fruits and vegetables, many people are worried about what they are eating.

Renewable Energy – Strictly speaking, renewable energy is energy that is replenished at the same rate it’s used. As the center of green living, renewable energy encourages use of solar, wind, and other alternative forms of energy.

Solar Energy – Solar energy is the conversion of the sun’s rays to energy, very good for green living. Active solar technology uses electrical or mechanical equipment to convert the sun’s rays into usable energy for heating or whatever. Passive solar technology does not use any outside non-solar energy.

Sustainablility – Sustainability, central to green living, is about preserving the environment and natural resources for years to come. It is the process of maintaining a small ecological footprint so that one’s life has no permanent detrimental effect on the earth. There are specific fields within it like sustainable architecture, sustainable agriculture, and sustainable development.Green living habits are worthwhile no matter what our circumstances – privileged or not.

Back in the 70′s Americans experienced the revelation that our country and citizens had become too dependent on foreign oil. As long as the oil embargo endured, Americans sought out ways to reduce their energy consumption which included retrofitting their homes.

The United States Department of Energy introduced a solar research program which focused on reducing building energy and consumption. It was determined that we indeed knew how to reduce energy consumption in homes and in home building. If we had kept building energy efficient solar homes we could have saved the equivalent of the amount of oil we were importing from middle eastern countries by now.

Eventually oil prices began to come down. Unfortunately, this diminished the interest and emphasis on creating and sustaining energy efficient lifestyles. The tax benefits and credits for utilizing solar energy expired back in 1985. The entire solar industry contracted as a result.

Asians and Europeans assumed the quest and continued down the path to energy efficiency, reducing energy consumption in virtually all sectors. As a result, their countries are among the global leaders in energy reduction. America, the sleeping giant, is finally awakening again.

We’ve come full circle as a nation and as a society and we find ourselves crossing the same bridge again, however the stakes are much higher now. According to oil experts we have already exhausted more than one half of all the oil in the world. The balance of remaining crude oil is further underground and therefore more difficult to access.

Offshore oil reserves are farther out to sea and the oil is more chemically complex which creates unique challenges. Essentially these challenges create difficulties that inevitably make oil more expensive. Oil will eventually become too expensive to utilize.

All fossil fuels are becoming increasingly expensive and difficult to obtain. Our country now imports most of our natural gas. The world demand for coal from China is also causing costs to rise. Now that we’ve considered the ramifications and global impact of burning fossil fuels, we’ve finally faced the realization that we can no longer bank on fossil fuels to sustain our power requirements for the future.

and :

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/04/26/faa_hacked_by_patriots/

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What happened in 1859 was a combination of several events that occurred on the Sun at the same time. If they took place separately they would be somewhat notable events. But together they caused the most potent disruption of Earth’s ionosphere in recorded history. “What they generated was the perfect space storm,” says Bruce Tsurutani, a plasma physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

To begin to understand the perfect space storm you must first begin to understand the gargantuan numbers with which plasma physicists like Tsurutani work every day. At over 1.4 million kilometers (869,919 miles) wide, the Sun contains 99.86 percent of the mass of the entire solar system: well over a million Earths could fit inside its bulk. The total energy radiated by the Sun averages 383 billion trillion kilowatts, the equivalent of the energy generated by 100 billion tons of TNT exploding each and every second.

But the energy released by the Sun is not always constant. Close inspection of the Sun’s surface reveals a turbulent tangle of magnetic fields and boiling arc-shaped clouds of hot plasma dappled by dark, roving sunspots.

Once in a while–exactly when scientists still cannot predict–an event occurs on the surface of the Sun that releases a tremendous amount of energy in the form of a solar flare or a coronal mass ejection, an explosive burst of very hot, electrified gases with a mass that can surpass that of Mount Everest.
What transpired during the dog days of summer 1859, across the 150 million-kilometer (about 93 million-mile) chasm of interplanetary space that separates the Sun and Earth, was this: on August 28, solar observers noted the development of numerous sunspots on the Sun’s surface. Sunspots are localized regions of extremely intense magnetic fields. These magnetic fields intertwine, and the resulting magnetic energy can generate a sudden, violent release of energy called a solar flare. From August 28 to September 2 several solar flares were observed. Then, on September 1, the Sun released a mammoth solar flare. For almost an entire minute the amount of sunlight the Sun produced at the region of the flare actually doubled.

“With the flare came this explosive release of a massive cloud of magnetically charged plasma called a coronal mass ejection,” said Tsurutani. “Not all coronal mass ejections head toward Earth. Those that do usually take three to four days to get here. This one took all of 17 hours and 40 minutes,” he noted.

Not only was this coronal mass ejection an extremely fast mover, the magnetic fields contained within it were extremely intense and in direct opposition with Earth’s magnetic fields. That meant the coronal mass ejection of September 1, 1859, overwhelmed Earth’s own magnetic field, allowing charged particles to penetrate into Earth’s upper atmosphere. The end game to such a stellar event is one heck of a light show and more — including potential disruptions of electrical grids and communications systems.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2003/23oct_superstorm.htm

Comments :

We have to understand some indicators before the coming of superstorms , to anticipate what will happen in 2012.

Kesan makanan gelombang mikro
4 .sebenarnya ibarat sisa/sampah di dalam badan manusia.
5. Mineral, vitamin dan khasiat makanan gelombang mikro berkurang atau berubah. Jadi badan kita dapat sedikit sahaja manfaat makanan. Badan kita juga menyerap kompaun-kompaun yang berubah itu, dan tidak dapat meleraikannya.
6. Mineral-mineral di dalam sayuran berubah menjadi radikal bebas yang menyebabkan kanser apabila dimasak/dipanaskan di dalam ketuhar gelombang mikro. Ini antara punca
mengapa pengidap kanser meningkat.
7. Makanan gelombang mikro menyebabkan ketumbuhan kanser di dalam perut dan usus-juga menjadi punca meningkatnya penghidap penyakit ini.
8. Makan makanan gelombang mikro berpanjangan menyebabkan sel-sel kanser meningkat di dalam darah manusia.
9. Makan makanan gelombang mikro secara berterusan juga menyebabkan merosotnya sistem imun melalui kelenjar limpa dan pengubahan serum darah.
10. Makanan gelombang mikro menyebabkan hilang daya ingatan, tumpuan, kestabilan emosi dan mengurangkan kecerdikan.

!

Terdapat banyak jurnal dan rencana kesihatan dan perubatan yang menjelaskan bahayanya ketuhar gelombang mikro kepada nyawa manusia. Antaranya:
http://www.mercola/. com/article/ microwave/ hazards2. htm
http://www.cancersa lves.com/ article/microwav e..html
http://www.indigosu / n.com/august99/ microwave. htm

Sumber : ANIS, Mac 2008