Exhibition Day One.

I think anyone with any interest in RFID should go to the exhibition. Its at Suntec Convention center, 4th floor. Anyone can register for free and enter the exhibition. The exhibition showcases not just RFID company, but also RFID printers, card packaging, both contact and contactless smartcard, basically everything about cards. Exhibition time is from 1000 to 1700.

If you head down to the 3rd floor by tmr, you'll find the paid conference going on behind closed doors. Outside the gate, you'll find my a pair of RFID gates and my laptop. Please don't steal my laptop. Anyway, if i'm there, you could get a RFID card from me to play around with it. Nothing much going on at the gates, just some eye candy. I think we're shifting the gates up to 4th level on friday, when the paid conference is over.

I went home lugging my laptop again. Went down to the pool for a swim. Babe watch activity zero, but it was alright, didn't want any babes to see my round tummy. Swam a couple rounds, which should equal to four laps on the international sized pool, yeah quite pathetic. It ain't the same swimming when you're tired. So i tried soaking in the pool. Water was kind of warm. But it ain't the same pool soaking if you're hungry. So i was done and out of the pool in less than 15 mins.

Sandra: Haha, thanks for the comment. Here's a little more about some issues in RFID. RFID can be classified into two groups. Active tags and passive tags. Active tags have battery and regularly sends signal out. Passive tags usually do not have batteries, and they send signal out only when in the RF field of the reader antenna. Stuff like library book tags, Ezlink card, and said grocery tagging would use passive tags, due to size, price and being practical.

RFID in sing.ah.pore operate in various frequencies within IDA regulation. The frequency we're used to seeing is 13.56MHz (Ezlink card). Any personnel (credit card size) RFID tag you have with you, is likely to be 13.56MHz.

WallMart and other big players are pushing the others to going into EPC or EPC Global, whatever. Now those aren't 13.56MHz. They are classified under UHF. Ultra High Frequency (13.56 is HF), the same ones whose antennas we're supposed to keep 25.5 cm away from.

However, there are issues with RFID. Alot of UHF's buzz is only hype. The RF generated by UHF is absorbed by water! So it would be quite impossible to tag individual items like milk, mineral water, simply because of the close proximity of tag to water.

Plus, RFID is not cheap when compared to perishable goods. Being able to tag individual items would be a nice idea. But until better technology/techniques come about, and the price of such technology/techniques becomes much cheaper, i won't want to be paying $[can't say, sorrie] for a loaf of bread : )

Also there's the issue of running out of unique ids which no one in the correct position seems to care about. Think internet protocol. Just not too long ago, IPv4 was supposedly to be more than sufficient. But the ip addresses were quickly running out and they had to change to IPv6. Um.. don't ask me what happened to IPv5.

RFID also runs the risk at becoming too invasive. At what point to we stop tracking? My boss says he wouldn't tag toilets and bedrooms. But who is to impose such moral obligations into other companies?

Hmm.. this seems pretty long. Rabbit.