You see, getting a free cell phone is no big deal these days as anyone can sign on a hand phone plan. To consumer like you and me, that’s really a jail lock on your monkey mind to discourage you from hoping around subscription offers every week or so.

I’m no different… but I can’t for reasons not so obvious.

It turned out that my Telco did offered to cut my bills by $210 over 2 years on a contract. I didn’t like the idea and did a bit of research for an alternative offer by its competitor, StarHub.

In any case, holding on to my seriously outdated cell phone for the past 3 years is something not commonly seen in young working adults these days. As you’ve probably guess by now – yes, I’ve gotten a new state-of-the-art cell phone on a really shoe-string budget!

Here’s the deal:

StarHub offered me an exclusive deal for the new Nokia E51 at SGD$48. At a low subscription plan of $20.80 ($16.80 + $5 caller ID) for 2 years, that is a massively savings of about $7 per month, or $168 for 2 years!

Hey wait… didn’t I said it is a better deal? I could have gotten $210 savings rebate from my existing M1 Telco?

Here’s the absolute comparison and the gist of the deal:

At my current $27 monthly subscription, I could never have afforded a $400++ (estimated retail price for the Nokia E51) concurrently with a hand phone upgrade package. That’s what the M1 customer service told me. Furthermore, the rebate will cease after 2 years, so what am I to do after that?

It doesn’t proof financially smart after all to hang on to a loosing deal.

To my surprise, StarHub offered a non-advertised, free 6 months cell phone subscription for the plan I signed up! That’s a whopping SGD$124.8 ($20.8 x 6) savings, rendering the E51 virtually free!

So when you see a deal like this again in the future, don’t wait, procrastinate and regret!

—

Come to think of it, it’s been over 10 years since I first own a mobile communications device! I’ve even made a little chart below with all the devices I’ve ever owned in my lifetime. Some of you might have seen a pager, while others may not even recognize my Semiens 2G cell phone!

I know what you’re thinking!

Most folks own at least 2 times the number of cell devices I’ve ever owned in the picture above. Regrettably, I must report that I’m not a gadget geek. I’ve long past the stage of growing up with the latest fanciful gadgets like Apple’s latest iPhone Nano, iPhone Touch etc.

Rather, I go for economic deals, practical and usability gadgets rather than for showing them offs.

Interestingly, the recent PC Show held in Suntec on weekends not too long ago was a clear evidence of strong consumer demand in spite of the record high inflation here in Singapore! Not only are consumers willing to pay for luxury electronic gadgets, they are more willing to loosen their consumer credits and loans in exchange for short term gratifications.

It’s important to point out here that borrowing money to make investments during inflation is far more financially intelligent than to allow your money to end up as consumer debt. In the latter case, it’s far wiser to extend your consumer debt to a minimum of 24 months 0% interest free credit loan than to opt-in for a 12-month interest-free payment loan. This way, you allow inflation to rot away the cost of your debts.

That’s just a little smarter shopping experience that you might want to rip in the future.

Stay hungry, stay foolish…

Have a great week ahead and live a life with passion!

©2012 Insights, Inspirations, Tranquility, Peace and Harmony. All Rights Reserved.

If you’ve been a regular visitor to my blog, I really got to thank you for your patience. I’ve been kept real busy for the past few weeks unable to write regularly for a good reason… it’s time for a change.

As Steve Jobs have pointed out in one of my earlier post, whenever I look into the mirror in the morning, and ask myself if I were to do what I’m about to do today for the past 30 days, I know it’s time for a change.

And you should too!

It has been a while that I’ve been writing articles based on my own experiences and some from others. I’ve gotten acquainted with the blogging platform I’ve been using and so far, I’ve been able to combine my passion in software and graphics design. Keeping abreast with changes in social media and technology will probably not going to change easily in the near future.

What will change is my presentation style.

In case you’re not aware, all the articles that I’ve written so far have been written with the very platform that have evolved quite a bit until now. Honestly, I haven’t really explored much about the blogging software until I made a tough decision recently to take a serious look at what readers actually wants to see.

I noticed that many of my readers are really tech/financial/entertainment geeks. Only a handful of visitors are friends and acquaintances. Considering what different readers really want, and what the blogging software can do, I’ve decided to build a structure out of the existing one.

In summary, here’s a rough breakdown of what’s up in the coming months:

Blog Presentation Style:

If you’re observant enough, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve started to style with smaller fonts.

I figured that smaller fonts with great content allows greater flexibility in template styling, while allowing spaces and graphics to fill in neatly. As display resolutions keep going up higher, and more mobile devices are better equipped to view web pages, it makes sense to plan longer term for such changes.

In case you’re not aware, this blog is now iPhone and iTouch capable! I reckoned that such changes shall cope with the popular in demand in the coming years… and any blogger should get prepared for the new age of mobile visitors.

As multimedia and social media gets widely accepted, it also makes sense for me to include targeted audiences using rich media like audio and video. I’ve recently added a video extension to this blogging platform that allows anyone to create video comments on all my past and future posts/pages!

To engage visitors and draw fresh content, I’m planning to supercharge various parts of the blog post and pages with special RSS feed capability, both inbound and outbound.

—

Blog Posts:

Blog posts are what makes up most blogs out there on the Web. Each post is like an entry that is arranged in order of date. The latest post is almost often at the top. Each blog post can be categorized into one or more groups.

My plan is to keep each post short and focus on current affairs. This should be aligned with what most blogs looks like everywhere else, without burning myself out writing long and deeply researched articles in each post.

As you’ve probably noticed by now (if you’re my regular reader – thanks dude!), I make deep researches and uncover evidences and facts before putting together a full article/post. On average, it takes me 1 to 2 full days to research, prepare (typing and graphics) and publish each. You get the idea how much information there is!

While trying to keep sane, I think it’s about time to keep current and short posts in the main thread, aiming around 300-700 words per post with about or less than 5 pictures to drive through a point. I’m also planning to keep the main page to display around 3 to 5 posts so readers can look back for a while.

As I pointed out, it’s going to keep me occupied writing about my experiences, while keep the details elsewhere… as I’m about to get to next.

—

Blog Pages:

What are blog pages?

Pages are very similar to posts. To understand pages, you got to contrast against posts. Posts appear automatically in reverse chronological order in most blogging platform. Pages are where I will present timeless information, mostly information sharing that I am passionate about.

Since most folks are not aligned to my “diverse” interest and passions, I have discovered that the best way to keep those topics isolated (and therefore more targeted), by creating specialized templates and run those pages in parallel with the main posts.

Each page shall have a main parent hierarchy (forgive me – I’ve always been an engineering professional), and each children pages shall be linked together using proprietary templates and codes that I write and customized.

For example, here are some root hierarchies that I plan to create as times passes by:

• WordPress Hacks
• IT Hacks
• F&B Hacks (Food & Beverages)
• Financial Hacks
• Reading Hacks
• Spiritual Hacks
• Other Hacks etc

Each root category shall drive down to sub-categories which are linked automagically by proprietary codes. All sub-category articles shall keep a consistent series of templates that shall remain relevant to the parent category. This may permit better human interactions, as well as relevance to indexing and bots engines who may be crawling around.

What else…?

Okay, these are just some ideas to get me up and going and probably very busy for the coming year ahead. Each category of information shall be specifically targeted for ideas and tips relevant to their topics.

And of course, this arrangement can assist me to isolate my diverse interests without getting killed trying to write lengthy articles as I’ve used to be doing. Furthermore, this arrangement allows me to extend the system engage freelance writers of anyone who may be considered domain expert to participate.

—

Blog Navigation:

This is a very trick part.

I’ve never been good at this and have tried to learn some great ideas from other bloggers and web designers. Navigation is tricky because it has to be able to allow anyone to find information on the site, while keeping it friendly to human and machines.

I’m looking at creating a breadcrumb-like navigational links on the top of the site, while keeping the bottom ones slightly complicated for visitors who would like to explore deeper into the site.

—

That’s it!

The existing blog RSS feed will continue to function as per normal. Comment feeds have been added where they will be serviced by the blogging platform for anyone who may be interested to watch any comments made in that interest post/page. I’ll be looking forward to the day where I have learn the art of creating specialized feeds to serve each and every interest groups on my blog.

If you are interested to become an editor, author, or freelance writer for any of my future interest categories, do feel free to drop by a comment and make your voices known.

Thanks for reading and do keep your comments coming in!

Stay hungry, stay foolish and live a life with passion!

©2012 Insights, Inspirations, Tranquility, Peace and Harmony. All Rights Reserved.

Every day, thousands of Singaporeans are being seduced onto Facebook and got hooked onto addictive applications such as games. Everyone’s talking about it over lunch and coffee!

Just why are Singaporeans so “into” this unique social networking platform?

My gut feel is – one can find 2 or more ways to look at the same book – or rather Facebook.

—

#1. Majority/Crowd Behavior

The majority sees it as an excellent social networking tool to increase cohesiveness between members of an organization, or to find long lost friends for all other personal reasons. Others use it for entertainment or some form of substitution for instant messaging and email applications.

#2. Business Opportunity?

On the other hand, this Facebook thing is a huge business opportunity for early adopters!

Like a cat pouncing onto a mouse, business owners and individual startups are already rolling up their sleeves on this coming stampede.

So many software developers have now turned their resources to helping marketers create viral applications to promote their products and services. Almost every major internet marketers have their own Facebook profiles, newbies alike are piling up daily.

—

Even academics are not spared.

Just yesterday, the local news reported NUS (National University of Singapore) to be the first local institute to offer a Facebook application design and programming course coming in semester 2 of 2008!

Here’s a quote from the NUS academic page that offers this brand new module:

CS3216: Software Development on Evolving Platforms
Semester 2, AY2007/08 (January-May 2008)
Modular Credits: 4 MCs
Workload: 1-1-0-5-3
…
Pre-requisites: A good grade in CS1101 or its equivalent, or strong design background with instructor’s approval. To ensure a diversity of experience and background in the class, students will submit personal statements to apply for a place in the course instead of bidding through the CORS system.
…
Starting AY2007/2008 Semester 2, the NUS School of Computing will be offering a new course on Facebook Programming! This new module is not your traditional software engineering course. Enrollment will be open to students of all faculties and students will work in small inter-disciplinary teams to create their killer Facebook applications. Programming experience for non-SoC students is not a pre-requisite (since work will be done in teams).

This 4-MC module is suitable for students with a strong programming background and high confidence in picking up new programming languages on-the-fly, and students who do not have extensive programming experience but who have a strong design background or entrepreneurial aspirations.

Source: CS3216: Software Development on Evolving Platforms

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Phwee! That’s a lot of heat isn’t it? But there’s more…

If you’re thinking of investing in Facebook Inc once it goes IPO, watch out! It could turn out to be Internet bubble Part II! However, Facebook can be as destructive at the micro level as it would for technology markets.

—

Q: How Does The Facebook Bug Affects You?

If you’re already bitten by the Facebook bug, here are some warnings that you may choose to listen. If not, it’s always good to learn a tip or two!

In general, Facebook is a tool that suggest non-productivity. You’ll most likely spend loads of time online trying to pet each other’s pet or kick your friend’s ass (opps, sorry for the putt!).

—

Answer: 1, 2, 3…

#1. Loss of Productivity

If you value productivity while you’re working on your business or job, do not ever logon to socialize or play games! You may be caught by your bosses if you’re employed by someone, or it’ll affect your business if you’re running one. It may drains your energy away while you’re deeply engaged.

I vaguely remembered the agony many colleagues faced when the company’s IT department shut off access to Yahoo and Hotmail.

Until today, we developers have great difficulty in accessing certain sourceforge projects from the office. It’s only a matter of time when the staffs of IT department paralyze everyone by using a whitelist system instead of blacklisting to block off unproductive sites such as YouTube or torrent sites such as The Pirates Bay.

What about Facebook?

I’m not sure about that for now. Maybe the heat of Facebook may not have yet triggered the bandwidth limit detector on the IT department watch monitor?

MSN may be blocked by many organizations, but IM over Facebook or any other Web 2.0 portals are not. Eventually, Facebook may be just as destructive and get banned by major organizations.

—

#2. Identity Squatting/Theft

If you’ve been bitten by the Facebook bug already, try logging into your account and do this exercise. Find the search box on the left and type in your first name.

Viola! There’s a high chance that you’ll see lots of duplicated <Your First Name> or profiles in Facebook lingo. I did a quick search myself and I see no less than 20++ “Wai Loong” already on Facebook! Fortunately, there’re not one “Ng Wai Loong” that has found a foothold yet and I’m proud to be the first one!

No hard feelings – really! As in any free services, you’ll be lucky enough to be the first and possibly only one to use that identity. Unfortunately, Facebook is much more forgiving…

Anyone CAN create a profile based on your name and stick a photo of you, masquerading your true identity! Now, that’s really disturbing isn’t it? Of course, in the hypothetical example above, I’ve just conjured it up with some magic from my graphics editing tool so please don’t be alarmed!

As of now, Facebook has no measure to sort out between the fake and the real. You’ve got to take that pro-actively to protect yourself.

One measure you can take is to establish yourself quickly and get all your siblings and friends to confirm your relationships with them as early as possible. That way, a fake profile will be easily to see through by your friends and acquaintances.

—

#3. Your Online Privacy

Let’s face it!
(We’re still on the topic of the face bug isn’t it?)

Once you start using Facebook, or any social networking portal, you’ll lose quite a bit of privacy should you enable your profile for public viewing.

In this case, privacy is a double edge sword.

Take for example, if you’re running a business. Exposing your profile may actually help to drive traffic to your products or services. If you’re operating a low traffic site, slapping your feed on your profile and exchanging feeds with similar and non-competing business owners may actually help!

Then again, there’s Facebook Pages where you can expose and connect your business to your prospects, fans and customers.

Given a choice, I’ll recommend setting up Facebook Pages over putting it onto your private profile. Why?

Your private profile may be protected behind PHP logins while letting loose your public profile can be easily indexed by search engines.

Finally, keeping your profile private from public views may actually harms you in some ways. That’s especially true if you too shy and decide not to put a picture of your face that associates to your own profile. Some even think it’s cute to put a baby face, or anything they fancy except for their own.

And if you think that’s dumb, you’re in for a surprise!

There’re literally millions of users out there who simply signs up, twiddle a little with Facebook for while and goes back to sleep. It’s pretty hard for any long-lost friends that genuinely wants to seek you out find before capable of identifying you.

Keeping your profile private on the other hand is just as bad as the sloth user above. Remember the issue of identity squatting I’ve discussed above? It may not be too long before this becomes a cyber criminal problem if nothing is done to protect all genuine users.

The best solution is to tweak and control your privacy settings that expose just enough information for your friends to identify you. Facebook provides a complete list of settings that you can tweak rather than shutting out your friends as most people have done on their profile settings.

>>> Click image for bigger view <<<

If you desire greater control, you may also choose to allow only your network of friends to see which of the applications you’ve installed on your profile. For special applications that you think is private only for your eyes, you may consider setting it up using the above privacy settings.

—

Whatever you choose to do, I sincerely trust that you too, will embrace and enjoy the tremendous changes that’s happening around now, and also well into the future!

Have an excellent week ahead and do keep your comments rolling in!

And always remember… Live a life with passion!

©2012 Insights, Inspirations, Tranquility, Peace and Harmony. All Rights Reserved.

You see, I’ve an excellent domain for personal branding. It’s great, and especially it’s on “.com“!

If you’ve been a domain hunter, you’ll know what I mean!

Unfortunately, branding building is only the first step. The next component of any web service is a reliable and affordable host.

Lately, the web host I’ve been subscribed on is giving me quite a bit of trouble. My eyes popped when the deadly message flashes across my screen for the first time from my web host:

“This Account Has Exceeded Its CPU Quota”

?!!!

The Investigation…

I’m no PHP expert – but I’ve tweaked quite a fair bit of unoptimized part of the theme for reasons obvious. Hey, I’ve even upgraded the blog software (WordPress) today, so where’s the real problem?

Feeling helpless, I decided to check the server logs… and boy am I surprised to find some nasty reports!

Here’s a snapshot of my investigation:

It appears that October 2007 is badly hit. Anyone isn’t dumb enough to realize something is wrong since September 2007. Poking further around reveals some gibberish on the latest log:

Fri Oct 26 23:46:13 2007: used 0.45 seconds of cpu time for HTTP Request: www.wailoong.com : GET /about/ HTTP/1.1

I googled around for evidences and I think I’ve found many similar ones faced by people all over the globe. In spite of many feedbacks on the host forum, many were not addressed at all.

So…

Can I conclude that it has something to do with the web host?

How else can you explain, that a light load process such as this one:

Fri Oct 26 23:46:25 2007: used 0.08 seconds of cpu time for PROCESS : /usr/bin/php index.php

be even considered exceeding the host’s CPU quota?

Sourcing For My Next Web Host…

I decided to seek out and maybe consider some locally based (Singapore) web hosts. A quick googling reveals some very interesting information:

Top Hosting Companies in Singapore

Sources: Web Hosting Singapore

IPMirror looks interesting enough as I’ve always been on the lookout to do some detective work that reveals where folks register and host their online services. Unfortunately, IPMirror did not reveal critical information such as monthly bandwidth, CPU quota, types of hardware the various plans offer etc.

What’s the use of telling me that I’m given x number of MySQL databases and disk space? Furthermore, it’s a LOT more expensive than most entry shared hosting services anyone can find in Canada and USA.

Here’s a listing of some criteria I’ve gathered from the wisdom of many other experienced guys:

• Bandwidth. You’ll never know if you need this especially if your site becomes a target of spammers and botnets.
• SSH access. Secure shell allows you to remotely control your hosted services.
• No artificially low limits. Hosting is CPU/RAM/Bandwidth/Storage driven. Those should be the limits, not resources like number of MySQL databases, emails etc.
• Fast customer response time. You can spy and get a feel of the host from existing customers on forums or blogs.
• mod_rewrite, AllowOverride. This is an Apache configuration on Linux so you can forget about using a Windows IIS web server. If you’re running Wordpress, this is to enable permalinks for SEO.

If you’re interested to research deeper, I highly recommend that you at least take a peek at 2 of Lorelle’s blog post that has very constructive discussions:

• Lorelle: The Taboo Topics You Need to Know When Choosing A Web Host
• Lorelle: I Hate My Web Host

—

As I dig deeper, I found 2 web hosts which seem to fit my budget, and they appear reputable (both having at minimum of Pagerank 6, with long business track record on WayBackMachine):

• MediaTemple
• A Small Orange (ASO)

At $20/mth hosting at MediaTemple, it looks great at the first glance. I haven’t seriously consider switching to a new web host, but since the cost works out to be similar at BlueHost (slightly more than BH actually), I don’t rule out that possibility when it expires in about 160 days.

ASO looks neat too, but I’ll give MediaTemple a shot if I’m not tight on budget.

—

Wait! Before You Commit To Pay a Penny…

Note: This is only relevant if your concern is running WordPress (one of the biggest shot in blog software) CMS.

Later this evening, I did more digging around the Web and found some light for desperate users who are not quite ready to bail out their hosting service. These are plugins you can use on your existing WordPress installation that may shed more light to your problem, and hopefully save you a few hundred bucks a year…

#1: How to Detect CPU hogs cause by WordPress Plugins:

Before you throw in the towel, here is one more step you can take (and it’s free!).

Lucia Liljegren has developed a very interesting plugin specifically for WordPress bloggers that can help identify CPU hogs on your installation. Here is a quote from the plugin page:

Has your service provider complained you are using too many server resources? This could happen because you have a really popular blog or blogs (like Tricia) or it could happen if you have installed a poorly written plugin that’s a real CPU hog or it could be a combination of both! Regardless of the reason, you can continue to run your blog by paying more for a dedicated server, but that costs big money.

If all your plugins are reasonable efficient and provide essential services, then spending for a dedicated server is well worth the money. But how can you make a lot of money if you waste money paying for a dedicated server just to run a CPU hogging plugin?

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to identify which of the zillions of plugins you use is the hog. Bloggers randomly turn things on and off hoping to find the problem. Now “PluginHogDetector” will at least help you identify the problem.

Since there’s no harm in trying, I got it uploaded and activate it…
Following the instructions on the plugin page, I disable all the caches (”gzips”) before running the test on my site. I repeated the measurement 3x.

Ah ha!

I was pleasantly surprised that some of my customized code (possibly the ones I modified for SEO) appear to be sucking up some CPU time at the end loops and footer. Now I know where to look out for when I go optimize those code later (Here, I mean when I’m really free since I’m a PHP novice)!

Below are the worst timings I’ve gotten:

Time To Serve in Seconds:

This may help shave a few milliseconds off your host box and hopefully that will earn you 1 more visit.Just imagine if a page gets serve frequently. It’s literally time saving of milliseconds or worse, seconds, if not for the ingenuity of caching designs for cutting down precious processing time!

WP-Cache (now in version 2), as it explains itself, makes your post load faster than the ordinary interpreted codes that comes with any standard WP installation. Here’s an extract from the pluging page:

WP-Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and then building the page from the database. WP-Cache allows to serve hundred of times more pages per second, and to reduce the response time from several tenths of seconds to less than a millisecond.

WP-Cache started from the “Staticize Reloaded” by matt and billzeller. Most of their recommendations also apply to WP-Cache. Current version, WP-Cache2, is a huge improvement over previous versions of WP-Cache.

I downloaded the latest copy, got it installed and activated – all under a minute.

Setting up is pretty fast and you can test it’s performance immediately!

So how does it performs?

All I can say is WOW!

You’ve got to see it yourself. This baby now becomes one of the most important plugins in my WP plugin collection.

You can download it all at WP-Cache @ WordPress.org | WP-Cache Plugin’s homepage

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#3: Turbo Charge Your Blog Post/Pages using WP Super Cache!

If you think WP-Cache is amazing, wait until you see WP Super Cache!

As of now, I’m running WP-Super Cache on my host, attempting to maximize performance.

As the plugin expains it best:

WP Super Cache gets around that. When it is installed, html files are generated and they are served without ever invoking a single line of PHP. How fast can your site serve graphic files? That’s (almost) as fast it will be able to serve these cached files. If your site is struggling to cope with the daily number of visitors, or if your site appears on Digg.com, Slashdot or any other popular site then this plugin is for you.

Setting up is slightly tricky if you have no access to your Apache’s “.htaccess” file on your server. However, it can be setup in no more than 15 minutes if you’ve the right tools and knowledge. The plugin has a detailed readme documentation on how you can setup with it.

Digg is one of the most CPU intensive plugin – according to my own in-house test. A more convincing performance review has been included on the creator of WP-Super Cache.

And if you ever run into trouble, I’m sure you’ll be able to find assistance on the plugin homepage.

You can download it all at WP-Super Cache @ WordPress.org | WP-Cache Plugin’s homepage

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#4: XCache/eAccelerator + WP Super Cache = Super Combo!

As if there’s nothing more you can do, this might be the icing on the cake to really supercharge your PHP code on your host!

Here is what the developer of XCache says:

eAccelerator and XCache are the two most-popular open-source opcode caching engines for PHP, and we highly recommend that any and all hosts use them to improve PHP performance by several folds. In particular, we recommend XCache for best performance.

The update to the WordPress opcode caching plugins brings a very important stability/reliability update to the table, especially for those of you running PHP as a multi-threaded (worker_mpm, PHP as ISAPI, PHP as NSAPI, etc.) extension to your application server (which isn’t recommended with PHP!).

To use XCache, you’ll need to download XCache and install it on your server first!
Next, you can download this plugin at XCache/eAccelerator Plugin’s homepage

I’m still experimenting with this recommendation so I’ll better keep my finger crossed. Until then, I’ll keep this post updated on my further findings!

Unfortunately, the folks at Bluehost does not seem to be happy with users installing XCache onto their severs.  This may become a huge problem for you if you can’t use the WP-Super Cache plugin for some unknown reason.  Here’s the reply I got sometime ago:

—

To sum it up all:

Dedicated servers are the only real solution to all your hosting problems.

Unfortunately, cost is usually the real consideration factor that pushes us to make sound business decisions. Only by proper evaluations can you ultimately decide based on real reasons why you should move on to a more expensive solution.

I really hope you’ve benefited somehow.

Enjoy and do live life with passion!

©2012 Insights, Inspirations, Tranquility, Peace and Harmony. All Rights Reserved.

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I don’t know if I have any faithful followers/readers to my blog posts, nor do I know if there are any like-minded bloggers out there that I can link to that I can further add value to my faithful readers.

If you have been faithfully reading all my past posts, you will know that I don’t post rubbish or non-value adding information, or that I copy original content from somewhere.  All my posts are seriously thought out and drawn from my own personal experiences, while constantly learning and integrating from wise people, both past and present.

In short, blogging to me is a very special personal commitment for personal improvement (spiritually, financially, relationships, career etc).   If you have never written consistently on a personal blog before, then I highly recommend you do so because you will come to learn so much more and it can serve as a connection between off-line and your on-line world.

Blogging uplifts your life.

“Huh?  Uplift what you said?”

Yes, exactly how, I cannot say.  You got to experience it yourself.

If you’re skeptical, I don’t blame you.

I have been through that stage for some time before launching this one. 

Here are some common reasons why most people NOT write on a blog and my personal opinion on each of these I call excuses:

Q: I have no interesting topics…
A: Everyone is unique.  We all have something we enjoy doing or passionate about.  This usually means laziness or no desire to learn.  When a human stops learning, it’s as good as dead.  I make no apology to that if you’re offended.

Q: I have no time to write my blog…
A: Blogging does not take you a LOT of time!  You can do it at your own free time and nobody will accuse you for not updating it.  Usually, I take my own sweet time to do research and update it on a consistent time frame.  I do so personally on a weekly basis when I reflect on the happenings in the week.  In fact, people who claim that they have no time usually means they have no self-discipline or desire to learn and share.  Again, I make no apology to that if you’re offended.

Q: I don’t know how to start a blog or write one…
A: No worry!  There are several free blogging portals out there that allow you to create for free.  Unless you’re a sophisticated blogger like me who enjoys tweaking my blog software and play around with widgets, you can always simplify your first blog creation by leveraging on one of the following free blogging platforms:

• Blogger (Google)
• LiveJournal
• MySpace
• TypePad
• Windows Live Spaces (Microsoft)
  
• Xanga
• WordPress.com

If you ever need help or resources, I will be most happy to point you to further resources or personally help you get started.

Q: I’m married with kids and I’ve got to spend time with them…
A: I don’t mean you forsake your family!  That’s the last thing that you will do to your life isn’t it?  You will HAVE spare time in a day or week where you will sit down or lie down, be it self-reflecting or thinking for yourself.  Besides, blogging software allows you to save your half-written work (drafts) if you’re in a hurry, and return to where you left off when you manage to settle down again for serious writing.  The important point here is consistency and improvements over time that matters.
Q: Okay, I agree with blogging but who will read mine? …
A: This is probably one of the greatest reason why most people don’t write (or give up) on their own blogs.  Who will read them anyway?  Unless you’re a hermit, I guess you WILL have some friends who are web literate right?  Ask them to check back on your blog often and interact with you.  If you like to reach out to lots of new friends and people who might be interested, you will need to acquire certain skills, such that your blog becomes marketable.  Marketing is one core skill in life that everyone should master.  I know of many people personally who make full time incomes or additional streams of income maintaining cooperate or personal blogs.

Q: I’m convinced!  What topic shall I use? …
A: I can’t answer that question for you.  Every human being is unique.  There is always something valuable we can learn from each other.  Truly, it is a blessing and karma for us all today to connect to one another, through the powers of technology and social networking tools.  Use your passion on something you know best or are obsessed about and get started.  You can always add topics later when you discover new ones or steer around to something different completely.

—
Most people fail in life (certain aspect of) not because they don’t have the knowledge or time.  It’s the difficult barrier of getting started, or procrastination, or even the comfort zones that hinders.

The key is to get started.  Have lots of friends to give you feedbacks and comments.  Most of the people I know off-line do not have their own blogs.  Nothing wrong with that but if you’re convinced of the benefits I mentioned, it’ll be crazy not to.

—

To sum up:

Everyone learns things by starting hands-on from somewhere.  No ones gains precious life experiences by reading all the books or acquiring all the knowledge in the world.  If knowledge is power, then the library of Congress or your neighborhood libraries should be guarded by the mightiest armies in the world!  Knowledge is power only when applied correctly and timely.

I’m a self-taught software programmer (over 14 years), web designer (over 10 years) and blogger (2 years), among many other important life long skills that I am currently learning right now.  Many skills in life can be learn on your own IF enough desire, effort and practice is poured in.

—

BlogRush

I haven’t mention about BlogRush did I?

I’m really sorry about that!  I was too carried off about the benefits of learning and building a blog that I have deferred announcing this blogging gem call BlogRush.

So what is BlogRush?

It is a new blog syndicating (beta) tool, a widget created for bloggers by a world famous marketer called John Reese.  John Reese has been an excellent marketing teacher I have been following closely for some time now.  I came only to know about it today.

Until now, blog syndication is made primary through RSS feeds such as feed burner and blog search engines such Technorat, rather than article writings.  If you haven’t heard about RSS feeds, then you really need to learn this!   Perhaps I can do some research at a later time and give a quick overview of this technology I am using daily.

Okay, in the blogosphere, there isn’t a floating voting and referral system for driving web traffic.  On the web, targeted traffic is everything.  If you have an on-line business, web traffic is to potential prospects, as it’s the blood is to a living body!

John has been building this tool for quite some time with his programmers and he feels it’s time for people to take advantage of this powerful technique.

Here’s what it looks like on my blog’s sidebar:

It’s 100% Javascript and it’s very easy to install!

Here are the steps I used:

1. Register for your free BlogRush account.

2. Fill in your blog or website URL.

3. Copy the Javascript for that URL (watch the video when you register).

If you’re like me who uses WordPress CMS software (I’m using the latest released WP 2.3 Beta-3), you can add it quickly on a widget text with a simple cut and paste action.

4. Once approved, your blog will be ready for syndication with the BlogRush referral system!

5. Whenever someones click on those links on the widget, it will link one referral to your account.  It gets better when the network of worldwide blogger grows.  The effect gets exponential as the system “ranks” referral blogs higher on the BlogRush displayed on your referral sites.

In case you’re wondering what are those colourful “buttons” above BlogRush… those are “chicklets” or RSS bookmarks for the listed feed readers.  You can subscribe to my blog posts and keep up-to-date on what I have published without having to visit this blog.  If you’re familiar with Google’s RSS technologies or even what I am talking about here, then the possibilities are infinite!

—

I guess I’ve revealed too much for now.

Take some time to absorb and reflect on what I meant and hopefully you can benefit somehow, somewhere down the road.  Perhaps, this may even be an inspiration for you to plan and start achieving something big in life yet!

Take care and live life with passion!

—

Useful Resources:
Wikipedia on Blogs
Wikipedia on Blogging Hosts
How To Build a High raffic Website or Blog By Steve Pavlina

©2012 Insights, Inspirations, Tranquility, Peace and Harmony. All Rights Reserved.

Incidentally, video bloggers are now very concerned on how this video fingerprinting technology will affect them (and us) in the future.

Resource Link:
YouTube Video Fingerprinting Due In September 2007

—

So how does that affects you and me?

Well, publishers like me and many others who have enjoyed the advantages of embedded flash animations are quickly looking out to see if there are alternatives.

Honestly speaking, there are many such media sharing sites out there. Will these other sites be under pressure to follow suit?

I really don’t know.

Personally, I prefer YouTube because it has a huge video database – virtually any movies and animations you can imagine are there. The trick is to know what key phrases to use and zoom in on those hidden gems.

—

What about non-publishers?

Okay, this is a tricky question. If you’re not a video fan, then it makes no difference. If you’ve never heard of YouTube or use its services before, then the upcoming change will not mean a thing to you.

However, if you happen to be a YouTube addict, then this may affect your life – somehow?

Why is that so? You see, media sharing is now so widely popular in the recent years, thanks to the widely availability of powerful and cheap digital video cameras/recorders.

Anyone now can afford to share their own private productions… so the question – will the ones you and I create be protected fairly?

Would you like to collect royalties when someone use your works?

Below is a YouTube video of someone who felt strongly in favor of Google’s latest move to protect (Your) digital copyright laws…

—

—
Okay, if you are disappointed by my remarks above, then maybe it is still not too late to check out this cool software “Ashampoo Clip Finder“.

Truly, this gadget is simply amazing but it’s not free. It has powerful search capability to search on all major media sharing search engines (YouTube, iFilm, VideU, MyVideo, Clipfish, SevenLoad, MySpace.com, MetaCafe, DailyMotion and Google Video).

To continue this trial software, you’ll have to pay for it after 10 days. Here is a snapshot of it:

If you’re looking for a great tool to download YouTube FLV files, but want it converted to a different format, then the ImToo YouTube Video Converter is an excellent tool for this purpose.

There are many similar ones available out there and I’ve tested a few of them. Personally, I really like ImToo and its user friendly and intuitive user interface.

Interestingly, I haven’t found the exact tool that I can use to download an entire selected playlist on YouTube. For your information, a playlist is a list of related media resources that is created by the same user that uploaded one in the series.

Perhaps you may have the answer I’m looking for?

Anyway, I trust that you can benefit from my little research today and thanks a lot for dropping by!

Have a wonderful day/week ahead!

©2012 Insights, Inspirations, Tranquility, Peace and Harmony. All Rights Reserved.

Two things I’ve noticed:

1. The US and Asia stock prices continue to hit new bottoms!
2. I’ve got over 30 unique visitors on National Day (9th Aug 2007)!

—

Insights #1:

As I’ve recently starting to learn about the equity markets, I’m not panicked by the recent shock. Hey, I’m no equity expert so please don’t take my words too seriously. On the other hand, I cannot deny that this continual decline will most likely going to hit my other investments.

The good news is, these are probably likely to be small adjustments until the market rallies again in the following months, so I guess there is no panic to sell if you’re freaked out.

Oh, and I was about to list some highly recommended books as essential readings for anyone serious enough to learn about value investing.

I am planning to make some purchases after reading some of the brighter feedbacks from other Amazon readers…

1. The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing. A Book of Practical Counsel (Revised Edition)
   by Benjamin Graham
2. Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings
   by Philip A. Fisher
3. The Five Rules for Successful Stock Investing:Morningstar’s Guide to Building Wealth and Winning in the Market (Paperback)
   by Pat Dorsey

—

—
Here are some of my insights:

If you’re going to buy any books, do check out the retail price and compare that against those selling on Amazon.com. You’ll be surprised at how much you can save, after deduction from overseas shipping and handling.

The catch? Perhaps, you may have to wait a while longer (10 to 40 business days) depending on which country you’re residing in.

If you’re living in USA, the super saving offers is definitely a steal because you get the products shipped to your home for free! Arghh… I wonder when Amazon will have this service available to their Singapore customers. Then again, we got to think hard. This will definitely turn out monopolizing this market so I guess that will not happen in the near future.

—

Insights #2:

Interestingly, I have decided to try out some new themes for my blog and also upgraded the blog software onto the latest version. The latest version carries a number of security fixes while the new theme give my readers a new and refreshing look.

If you’re looking for some outstanding themes for your own blog, do check out: http://www.bestwpthemes.com/

To boost your blog traffic, check out this insightful article by Paul Stamatiou: http://paulstamatiou.com/2005/11/03/how-to-boost-your-blog-traffic/

—

Oh, and did I mention a visitor windfall on NDP?

Yes! I was quite excited at the number of Singaporeans searching to view the NDP over the Internet. Let’s take a look at my log:

Did you notice 30 unique visitors at the peak? Yes! And they’re all referred by Google!

Here is a snapshot of what and where these visitors are searching for/from:

I don’t have that many daily visitors on average so I think these Singaporeans living overseas must have had an itch to see what is happening back here in Singapore!

Unfortunately, Google point them to the wrong pages (> 90% of the time) when they are looking for the live webcam link on my NDP @ Marina Bay Part 9 post.

Google bot was unable to identify the most relevant article from my sidebar where it should have been when I added Part 10. It was shifted out of view on my main page as I did not want more than 1 article to fill the main page.

Hmm… I have no fix for this at the moment perhaps you can advise if you happen to be an expert on WordPress SEO?

—

Opps! I guess I’m getting too technical now so I’ll leave this topic open for anyone out there who care to share their insights? Have a wonderful evening ahead!

©2012 Insights, Inspirations, Tranquility, Peace and Harmony. All Rights Reserved.

Then, I predicted that one day, we can get real-time information in one single device we currently know as hand/mobile phone today. And most people think that a handphone is nothing more than an integration of devices such as phone, contact book, texting (sms), mp3 player, game machine, web browser – you named it.

And I think we’ve seen nothing yet.

From the perspective of businesses and consumer trends, we are all heading towards an era of super information age. So what has Google’s business vision got to do with your life?

In case you’ve been living in the mountains for the last 5 years, you wouldn’t have missed the rise of Google and how many millionaires Google has helped created and yet more (that’s you and me!) will come into the future!

Actually, Google’s vision to index every conceivable information on this planet earth has slowly materialize and gone beyond that ideology. Imagine Google combining Google Earth, Google Maps and world-wide Google Local (using Maps actually)… the world will turn upside down!

Think about that for a second and let that sink into your mind, for this is serious stuff I’m talking about here. Imagine every conceivable businesses to automatically jump at you when you think about it for your everyday needs, such as the grocery store, the post office, the bank, the nearest petrol kiosk, the nearest university or campus… you name it, Google got them nailed on your Google Phone like a GPS!

Am I crazy talking about such weird things?

Let me just show you some of the amazing things Google created recently. It’s called Google Streets View feature that is embedded in Google Maps. This feature looks strikingly similar to an earlier development made by some Chinese engineers in China, showing 3D rotation view of a small section of street in some provinces of China.

Google actually beat that by taking that step miles ahead of the Chinese and created a 3D view of almost ALL the streets in the United States of America!  That itself is an amazing feat really and I wondered how much resources Google took to get those pictures taken around the country!

Maybe very soon, Google Maps will index every streets here in Singapore and the rest of the world!  That can be quite spooky to think of if you happen to walk on the streets and get caught on the cameras!  Just imagine that your pictures will then live immortally in the data center archive in Mountain View California (home of Google data center).  Scary, NO?

Here is a picture of proof of the Hyde Street which I visited a couple of months back and the image is amazingly clear!

I can rotate and follow the street directions around the 3D map and see the surrounding buildings!  Imagine if you got a business and your advertisement can jump out of the map… this technology is darn powerful!

In case you think I’ve made this up, you can check out an introductory video clip Google released on YouTube during its launch on 29th May 2007.

You will need the latest Macromedia flash plugin for your web browser otherwise it will just simply shows an empty box above.

I think the work Google has done is just scratching the surface of what they can really do with all these information. Who knows one day we may be stuck to our mobile phone (if we still call it one by then) and too scared to leave home without it.

What do you think?

Let me hear your thoughts in a comment here and thanks a lot for reading! 

Have a wonderful weekend ahead!

.

©2012 Insights, Inspirations, Tranquility, Peace and Harmony. All Rights Reserved.

After a while, I noted that there are some really good ones out there, including Google YouTube(TM) and imeem.com. If DRM (digital rights managements) don’t come around and put them out of business, then chances are that content sharing will continue to thrive and people like you and me shall benefit from information sharing.

As an advocate for free (free in this context means freedom, nothing to do with monetary) software and knowledge exchange, I am constantly disturbed by the risk of infringing copyrights of artworks and other medias.

One way to overcome this is to leverage on OPC. I like this term because I coined it.

What is OPC?

OPC is not new. It is synonymous to OPM, commonly known as “Other People’s Money“. By the way, I bet you’re familiar with this terminology if you’ve been reading Robert Kiyosaki’s “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” Series. Similarly, we can take the concept further by leveraging on the works of others, without actually infringing the copyright works of others.

OPC means “Other People’s Content“.

I’m not saying that you go around ripping off the work of others. What I mean that you borrow the work of others through vehicles like YouTube, where the use of media is entirely up to the public and infringement is limited to the fair use of the distributor. Now, if Google YouTube is to loose court cases like this, then the entire Internet shall implode.

The Internet IS a platform of knowledge sharing and that is exactly what benefits humanity most! No man could imagine such explosive of knowledge in the past century – thanks to technology like the Internet. We are enjoying what kings in the last centuries have probably never enjoyed, so we are truly blessed!

.

Okay, enough of that actually… so here is some blessing for you:

I’ve actually added imeem.com media flash player to this blog which further enhance my visitor’s reading experience. While adding to the playlist, I’ve also found a very touching MTV on YouTube which I think my Chinese visitors will like very much. This clip is probably copyrighted and hopefully YouTube does not take it down anytime soon. If you like the video, please support them by being their fan or buy their music album.

Enjoy and have an excellent day ahead!

.

©2012 Insights, Inspirations, Tranquility, Peace and Harmony. All Rights Reserved.

I’m not saying that Firefox is immune but I figured that it’s a lot more secure than any other web browsers that I have used. After all, I’m still a security professional so please pardon my security awareness.

I noticed that most of my visitors are just simply not seeing what I see simply because they are using Internet Explorer 7.x or 6.x! The sidebar of this blog tends to get shifted downwards, after all the blog posts at the bottom are displayed.

Since there are a lot of useful information I put up at the sidebar, I decided to tweak the theme code and hopefully it may solve your problem one day should it arises.

Initially, I couldn’t find answers on exactly what went wrong, so I fired up my favorite browser and search engine (Google) and did a quick search. The only clue I found was at a discussion topic on WordPress:

[resolved] Right Margin Problems

A few minutes of hacking later and Viola! I’ve got it all straighten out! Below are the modifications I made to get it working nicely.BTW, I’m a geek so I make no apologies for going into the details below.

/* wp-content/themes/unwakeable-1.2/style.css */

#page {
background: white;
text-align: left;
margin: 0 auto;
padding: 20px 0 10px;
position: relative;
width: 785px; /* <- Here is the culprit! */
border: 1px solid #ddd;
border-top: none;
}

* html #page { width: 785px } /* <- IE hack also not working */

…

And then further down the same file, you need to match the header to the width of the entire theme:

/* wp-content/themes/unwakeable-1.2/style.css */

#header {
height: 100px;
width: 785px; /* <- Adjust this to match the width above */
color: #fff;
background: #333;
border-left: 1px solid #555;
margin: 0 !important;
}

…

That’s it! Mission accomplished!

I would appreciate much if you will drop me a comment when it has saved your day!

©2012 Insights, Inspirations, Tranquility, Peace and Harmony. All Rights Reserved.