Andrew Ooi

Recently I had to go over to my cousin’s place to use the WiFi because  I have problems at my place.

There is this girl who is a friend of my cousin’s family also staying in one of the rooms. She is lucky because she is from out station and studying in KL with no worries about place to stay. Yes, she stays rent free. I do not know why but she does not seem to like me being there and whenever I turn on my notebook to work using the WiFi she goes to the WiFi router to turn it off. At first I thought it was because the modem lost connection and needed to be reset. However, looking at the power switch, it’s been turned off! I turned it on again and everything worked fine. Minutes later it was turned off again. I got angry when I went downstairs to find the router turned off again. I counted to 10 so as not to break down the door and ask her what her intention was but lucky (for her) I’m a chess fan and the game of chess has given me patience. So this incident has gone without confrontation or me asking for an explanation for her. Luckily this was the only one incident.

The other times she would reset the router multiple times because I assume she has problem with her own notebook connecting to the internet. That I understand because it’s a Acer notebook computer with crappy WiFi internal card. I have no problem myself and after every one of her resets my Dell notebook connects immediately and I would only notice because my taskbar would have a small balloon saying I’m reconnected again. I could try to help her but what for?

I really don’t want to know or talk to people like these. Seen too many in my times. They appear normal to certain people but act like the devil to others.

Sorry about this negative rant. I just had to get this off my chest..

Popularity: 20% [?]

Almost everybody who is familiar with the internet has used chat software such as Yahoo Messenger or AIM/ICQ. There is another type of chat software that can be activated from a website. On my web hosted account (not this one), I find one of the best features of the support website is that you can click on the “Live Support” button to chat to a support personnel. It has saved me countless times when my website faced some technical troubles. Needless to say, I have used this feature more than emailing support.

I found one company called UZOOM which offers this very chat software. I think it’s a good idea particularly if you want to interact with your website visitors but do not one to give out your YM/AIM/ICQ personal ID. That way you get to keep your private messenger ID for close friends and use UZOOM for public chat. UZOOM is not just any chat software as it has cool features such as seeing who is on your website/blog in real time, where they came from as well as see the search term they used to get to your site (if any).

It’s great for providing live customer support to your website visitors but I can also see it being used in a enthusiast or hobbyist blog were the members get to chat with the webmaster directly from the website.

Popularity: 25% [?]

That’s because it’s the end of the month again and the best time to cash out is today if you want to get your cheque early. I just clicked on the Cash out button.

Not much but that’ll probably cover transportation costs around town for about a month.

Popularity: 27% [?]

Wow! Less than 30 minutes after I made payments I checked and ChessPublisher.com is back up again! Now that’s what I call fast service from GoDaddy.

Popularity: 34% [?]

I was only busy for one week this month and I let ChessPublisher.com expire because I didn’t check my emails.

Luckily I noticed this morning and quickly renewed it using GoDaddy. If I had been late it would been a hassle to pay for re-activation fees or risk losing my domain like Stonemaster.biz.

Since ChessPublisher is a service, it’s bad for it to go down for a couple of days as it also affects all the blogs using the chess diagrams hosted on this domain.

Price : USD 7.15 for the year which is pretty cheap because I got it with discounts. Renewal was done in minutes and I paid online using PayPal. ChessPublisher should be up in 24 hours.

Popularity: 34% [?]

Further my previous post on multitasking is stupid I think it’s more dangerous if you multitask while driving. A good friend I know always uses his phone on the road. He will read and send SMS and email on his smartphone every chance he gets when the car stops at traffic light or when the car gets stuck in a traffic crawl (especially common in KL). A lot of the time I’ll have to reminder him “hey, the light’s green” before he takes his eyes off his phone and starts driving again.

Then there are the people who talk on the phone while driving. Sure you can use hands-free headsets but studies have shown it’s not the holding of the phone to your ears on one hand that is distracting. It is the conversation taking place while driving that is distracting. It seems that since you do not see the person you are talking with, your brain focuses harder on the conversation compared to face-to-face communication. Hands-free or not, talking on the phone while driving definitely reduces the driver’s alertness on the road.

Anyway I’m just of the opinion that the car is just a big weapon. Again, multitasking may be a skill some are better than compared to others. Just be grateful you are lucky and don’t encounter some wreckless drivers with bad multitasking skills.

Popularity: 35% [?]

Foreign Currency being the most liquid financial trading medium in the world so it’s not surprising that it’s akin to trading in the stock market but on a much more bigger scale.It is so big that an estimated US$ 4 trillion is traded daily according to Wikipedia.

I’m interested on this subject matter as I would like to have some form of investment where the returns are high. Granted that foreign currency trading is so much more riskier compared to playing on the stock market, it is prudent to go armed with the best information available.

I like this site called FabForex.com which is basically the richest source of reference material you can find on Forex Currency Trading online. The page layout and navigation for that website is simple with articles listed with headlines and excerpts. A Google search feature is prominently up in the header allowing for easy search of the tons of useful material there. For example, one article explained the importance of charting market prices to gauge trader sentiments on a given moment in time. It even went on to explain terms such as Pivot Points and how it is calculated.

It’s a well of information and I’ve already saved in my delicious book mark under the tag of money and investments.

Popularity: 34% [?]

I have spent many sessions in Starbucks to work online. It’s the sign of the time that Starbucks Corp is closing down 600 stores in the US. Sign of recession that is.

I don’t know if this will impact overseas branches like Starbucks Malaysia but I hope it doesn’t. In fact, Starbucks just opened new branch in Tanah Rata, Cameron Highlands a month or two ago.

It’s still a good place to meet up with friends and I’ve discussed many work projects at Starbucks. One of my complaints is some branches have WiFi that is not working. Imagine how disappointing it is to buy a ten bucks coffee and sitting down with your laptop and finding out you can do any work because the WiFi is on the fritz.

Starbucks Corp  said on Tuesday it plans to close 600 underperforming U.S. stores and cut up to 12,000 full- and part-time positions, as it copes with an economic downturn and increasing competition.

The coffee seller, bracing for its first full-year profit decline since 2000, has been grappling with the slowing U.S. economy and consumer spending at the same time that major competitors like McDonald’s Corp  have begun attacking its core business.

~ more from Yahoo Finance

Popularity: 40% [?]

I have registered many Free Blog services just for the heck of experimenting and finding out their features. Here is another free blog service - Thoughts.com.

It took me only less than a minute to create and account and I tried out posting a post.

The first thing I noticed is the “Who can view” feature which not many other blogging platform has. This means I can either make my post public or just let only friends and family view it. That makes thoughts.com unique compared to Blogger.com or Wordpress.com which does not have this feature.

Other features are:

1. Upload and share photos and/or videos
2. Chat and forums
3. Choice of themes
4. Free polls

So instead of the mainstream blogspot, there are good alternatives such as thought.com which is pretty sold in terms of ease of use and features. It’s a good entry point to starting blogging for beginners and it’s has enough features to satisfy the experienced blogger too.

It’s still early but for a simple blogging platform, Thoughts.com looks promising. I like the domain name too as it’s appropriate. It’s a place where you share your thoughts in the form of blogs. Best of all it’s free!

Popularity: 44% [?]

Yesterday I was on Yahoo IM, clicking on my daily 600 Entrecard drops, writing sponsored posts, checking my email and having dinner all at the same time. That’s multitasking for you. Doing multiple tasks at the same time. Although it sounds good, but humans weren’t made to multitask. The term ‘multitask’ came from computer processes where a job or task can be quickly time sliced by the computer to perform each one in a allocated time and switched to the other one so fast that it seems all the tasks are being performed at once. Computers have gotten better in this aspect because of technology has resulted in CPUs that are faster and some computers even have more than one CPU (multiprocessors) in them.

Over the years the term multitasking jumped into job resumes indicating that the person has multiple marketable skills and can perform each one at the same time. Employers even advertised for people who can multitask. For example, it as a useful skill to have the ability to answer the phone in one hand while working on the computer pulling out reference records with the other. But I think we have over glorified the term ‘multitasking’.

We humans are not computers. We can’t get our brains to work faster or split it in two (dual core?) to get more done.

Darren Rowse of Problogger.com wrote a nice article reaffirming what I believe in. We can be more productive if we batch process. That just means we concentrate on one task until it’s finished and then go on to the next.

As can be seen from my blog, I’ve not been posting often here. All thanks to ‘multitasking’ when I felt so kiasu I have to answer every email, IM message and have work all open at the same time. In the end, I get less done. I even justify that I can’t blog here so often because I was so “busy”.

Anyway, I’m making changes now and I’ve started to do concentrate on one thing at a time. I leave my IM on only on specific times of the day. I do my writing assignments in one fixed allocated block of time. I also try not to eat my meals with the notebook in front of me. Just went out to CentrePoint and saw many office people after work having dinner while having their notebooks turned on.

It was also funny while writing this post I saw LiewCF’s blog picture of a person working with 4 notebooks in front of him. Can a person be more productive facing 4 computers ?

Popularity: 49% [?]

I’ve been getting a worrying number of Yahoo Messenger spam lately and it has been consistently 2-3 spam messages a day. The message would usually be “Got a minute?”, “Hey Andrew”, etc. I immediately add those people into my “ignore list”.

However browsing thru forums I now see that there are actually robots or ‘bots’ out there that can harvest thousands of Yahoo messenger IDs and send those spam messages automatically. So blocking off a spam account may not be so effective anymore as these bots can register new multiple Yahoo Messenger accounts in seconds. They have gotten so sophisticated that they can even read graphical captchas designed to filter out non-human registration.

To me this is frustrating as I still use Yahoo Messgenger to keep in touch with old friends and ex-students.  I hope Yahoo find better ways to defeat these automated bots. Until then I have to live with clicking on the “block user” button whenever I encounter a suspicious spam message.

Popularity: 45% [?]

Yes I agree that it’s a controversial thing to give students credit cards. Some may think this is a bad  idea as this will lead to an early debt ridden young adult when they graduate. But I think with good practices, credit cards can become a boon instead of a burden for the young ones.

First of all you must make sure that you only spend on essential items. A credit card is not a ticket to spend without limits. Secondly you must learn to make payments on time every month so as not to fall behind in payments. Also of note is that you must never spend over your credit limit. If all this can be done, then the next step is to find the best deals on credit cards.

Here websites like StudentCreditCards.com (easy to remember name!) is helpful. They list down all the credit cards suitable for students so that you can make comparisons and this helps in deciding which is the best credit card to get. Besides that the site is a good resource and filled with articles such as telling you how to protect your credit scores and other best practices on owning and using a student credit card.

Popularity: 48% [?]

Watch out Australia and New Zealand!

Are Americans Really That Stupid? - video powered by Metacafe

Popularity: 57% [?]

I’ve broken the Alexa 200K mark!

All that thanks to Entrecard and not my content really. I have not been generating any traffic at all to this blog because I have not taken the time to update it. Anyway, Entrecard + good content is killer if you are a beginning blogger. Not that Alexa is important but like I said before, there is no other metric besides the two most popular - Google PR and Alexa being used on the web today. Although there are others being devised such as “Compete” ranking but they are still in early stages and are not mainstream yet.

Next target. Break 100K mark?

Popularity: 63% [?]

Nowadays many office jobs involve a high number of hours spent in front of the computer. As someone who earns full time from the internet I too spent almost half the day working on the computer.

Remember the girl who worked herself to death? A doctor friend of mine said she probably suffered from DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis). It happens when blood clots form in your vein. It’s more common then you may think and it happens quite commonly in your leg veins. It can be life threathening when the blood clots travel in the blood stream into your lungs or heart.

How to avoid this?

DVT happens when you are inactive. So, to prevent it is easy. Just take a break from the computer every half an hour and stretch or legs. Even simple pointing exercises with your feet is good enough. Also, avoid too much caffeine and drink lots of water. For me, I make sure I get up and walk around before continuing my work.

Remember this is not as uncommon as you think.

DVTs occur in about 1 per 1000 persons per year. About 1-5% will die from the complications

 

~ Wikipedia

Popularity: 65% [?]

3100 EC credits for USD 2.27

Yeah that’s the cheapest by far on eBay and is closing in 5 minutes.

Popularity: 65% [?]

Yeah that’s the cheapest by far on eBay and is closing in 27 minutes.

Popularity: 66% [?]

I’ve been having terrible internet connection the whole year round. So I’ve been researching alternatives to what I can use to connect to the net. It turns out there is such a thing called Satellite Internet.

It certainly sounds futuristic but believe me, the technology is here and being used today. The technology has advanced in recent years and offers speeds up to 2000 Kbps which is pretty fast. Plans from HughesNet range from 59.99 to 189.99 depending on how fast a connection you want.

Doing my research via Wikipedia I found out that there are one way satellite and two way satellite communication technology. The former is limited and requires an additional phone line modem which is a pain. I’m happy to say Hughes Net does not use that older form of technology and instead makes use of the superior two-way satellite technology. This allows for  high-speed internet connection without the hassle and time delays of dialling up and loging in.

Another plus point is that you can opt for the Promotional Purchase option where you pay $0 upfront and spread the rest of the payment over 24 months. Best of all to use this technology you don’t need a high end computer. The very bare minimum is :Windows 98SE or higher or Mac OS 10.1 or higher and Network capability (10/100 Ethernet pre-equipped).

Popularity: 63% [?]