Has almost abandoned this site again. Someone was telling me blogging is a lifestyle, and I really have to agree to it. When I was much younger, writing a diary was almost always one point in my annual exercise to establish new year resolutions. And almost every year the diary-writing efforts would whither away within months, if not weeks of starting out.

Along came the Internet and blogging bloomed. Got myself a few blog sites, all focusing on different topics. This blog is the only one where I post "Miscellaneous" stuff, so it is the closest to some sort of a diary. Needless to say, the same person leads the same lifestyle, and after some initial ethusiasm in keeping the blog up to date with my thoughts, the postings dwindled again. Anyway, I have came to terms with that, and since it is part of my lifestyle to occasionally come to this blog site to post my thoughts (occasionally means months in between to me), just let it be.

My good friend Wilfrid Wong has recently set up his blog site. Includes writings he has done over the years. Interesting person with interesting thoughts.

Deliberately Concealed Garments Project | Clothing found hidden in buildings

Was browsing the web, and looking at a particular web hosting company for its hosting offerings. Wanted to see some examples of the sites it has hosted, so I clicked on the link for "Featured Site of the Day", and I got directed to the site above.

Why in the world would anyone be interested in garments hidden in buidling? Apparently there is a group of people who are interested enough to create a group and spend the money and effort to put up a website. One more reason for me to be confused about the world.

I am dealing with a Taiwanese client currently, and was cracking my brain to think of what "Content Management System" is called in Chinese. Tried BabelFish and the result I got was "美滿的管理系統". Ok, I know I hope my clients will be contented with the CMS that I will be providing them, but the

I tried "web content management system" and got "網路內容管理系統". This should be what I want, since "content" maps to "內容" more naturally. Did a google search with "內容管理系統" and found an article in InterWoven's site on it. Ok, this confirms that the term is used at least by one of the bigger content management system vendor.

The same article also taught me the names of a few other terms: Enterprise Information Portal - "企 業入口網站", which means "portal" will map to "入口網站". Knowledge Management is "知識管理". Interestingly the same article simply used "e-learning" without translating it. Is that too new a term to be coined?

After some two weeks of thinking, switching decisions between striking out on my own and returning to another salaried job, I have finally decided to start my own business. Don't have a well articulate business plan yet. Don't even have a good idea what would be my primary focus. For now, I am mostly taking in sub-contracts from others to build up my cash reserves. Sustainability comes first. However, in the mean time I can also manage my own time and not be hurried by time constraints to rush to work and to rush off work. The new found freedom allows me to be able to spend some time to do other things that I would otherwise simply put off to later (which usually means never).
The website for the new business (sole-proprietorship, which also means it is a one-man-show - with help from my wife) is now being built. Will reveal the URL when I am ready.

Headache in the morning....
Drowsy during driving...
A loud thud, not as loud as thunder...
A first time, kissed into taxi's bumper...
$100 poorer, but my head became clearer...

No more AXN watching until 2 am

Saw this poll in JobsDB.com's site: "I'm now in my 40s and I'm willing to forego high pay for a more fulfilling and meaningful job / life".
 
Interestingly I am now in my 30s and I am already foregoing a senior post in a SME in Singapore for something less, because I want to be able to spend more time with my son.  In fact, a few of my peers are feeling the same way as me.  Is this a sign of earlier burn-out in the younger generation?  Does it mean that people are more pampered than earlier generations, or that the worklife demands placed on people nowsaday is so great that burn-outs occur earlier in the career life?

Now that we have a baby at home, we barely have time to sleep, let alone the opportunity to go for movies at the theater. Fortunately some enterprising Singaporeans started DVD home delivery services: Hollywoodclicks and MovieMaster.

Photoshop wars - http://www.jadeit.com.au/jcsworld/war3.html. The result you get when someone with good photoshop skills have a lot of time on his hands.

Has been waiting for fresh gmail invites in my gmail account for days. Not sure what is the algorithm for google to provide the gmail invites, but somehow I only managed to get one invite so far. Reading others' blogs tell me that some people get as many as 5 or 10 invites a day!
Again, confused. Is it really the case that the gmail invites are handed out at random?

[Specific to Singapore]
Received a mailer from HSBC informing me that now I can pay my income tax using the credit card I have with the bank. "Cool!" was my first impression, since this will mean earning the rewards points for something I will be spending on in the first place.
However, upon reading the brochure in more detail, I realised the procedure is as such:

• make a GIRO arrangement with IRAS to deduct your income tax from a bank account every month
• Send HSBC the GIRO payment plan and the said amount will be paid from the credit card into the said bank account

The interesting thing for me is that the same bank account I will be asking HSBC to credit will the be the same bank account I will be drawing my cheque against to pay HSBC at the end of the month.
Makes little sense for me to sign up for something that will put money in my account just for me to pay them back a few days later. Upside is the rewards points I will get, but the downside will be the interest and penalty I need to incur when I forget to pay my credit card bill in time (which I might, given my absent-mindedness).

Nice photo of the baby after he has successfully turned from his back to his belly.
pic posted using

The previous photo was taken using a Sony Ericsson T610. This one is taken using the new Nokia 7610.
pic posted using

At a certain time of the day, with a certain amount of sunlight, the toilet bowl in my office looks like it glows from within. Just an interesting sight that I thought I wanted to share.
Posted by Hello

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page An interesting way to produce an encyclopedia. Using the opensource methodology, it is possible to author quite a lot of things out there. I found this page when I tried "open source government" in Google, and discovered a new concept where government policies are drawn up very much the same way source code is written in the open source environment.

Recently I have been uploading my baby's photos to blogpost via hello.com's IM client. However, one problem I encountered was that when I attempted to delete a wrongly uploaded image, there was no way for me to do it.

I was using my Yahoo Mail Plus! account (the one where I pay $19.99/year for bigger space and was informed that they will be upgrading my mailbox to 2GB at no extra costs. This sounds like good news to me. However, as I continued to surf the site, it seems like the engineers are still working on the roll-out, on the production servers!

Sometimes I will see a plain interface, sometimes I see the new interface, and sometimes I see the old interface. Sometimes I am told I have 25MB quota, and sometimes I am told I have 2GB quota.

The most interesting thing is that I actually received an email from yahoobot telling me that my quota is -2048MB and I am currently taking up 2MB, which is way too much over the quota I am given. hahaha!

Anyway, I trust Yahoo engineers know what they are doing, and I think I won't complain about a little interface issues, when I am given a 2GB mailbox upgrade at no extra cost.

I am in the midst of cleaning up what I call my "online identity". Basically this means cleaning up the pointers that point to pages either created by me or about me.

Along the way, I remembered there was a domain forwarding service I subscribed to and I have a domain name like this: dunpanic.rulestheweb.com. Egoistic, but it is something that I can remember really well even after years. So I looked up the site hosting it (in fact I forgot that www.v3.com was the correct site, so I tried www.rulestheweb.com and found it.) and realised (remembered) that it is now pointing to my old Radio site at http://radio.weblogs.com/0106689/. Ok, time to update it to point to my jroller site at http://www.jroller.com/page/dunpanic.

It had always been my dream to be able to blog from a mobile device. In my opinion the best use case of blogging is to allow one to write down snippets of thoughts anywhere, anytime.

Now that my latest gadget acquisition has bluetooth built-in, plus the fact that I already own an Ericsson T610 phone with a SingTel GPRS connection, this is no longer just a dream.

Of course the second way is to connect to a WLAN using my iPAQ. This is made possible by the SDIO 802.11b card from Socket and of course WLAN connection.

Finally I succumb to the temptation of buying the Jabra FreeSpeak bluetooth handsfree set. A trip to Funan during lunch today, and I am now trying it out in my office.

It took about 2 hours for a full-charge, and setting up was a breeze on my Ericsson T610. The manual guides me through the process of setting the set ready for bluetooth pairing, and I had to go through a few steps on the T610 to get it to work.

First go to Connectivity->Bluetooth->My Devices->New Device. The T610 would detect the Jabra 250 device. After this, go to Connectivity->Bluetooth->Handsfree->My handsfree and you will see JABRA 250. Click on JABRA 250 to select it, and you are done.

Making calls and receiving calls is as documented in the manual, either by using the phone or the button on the handsfree. Sound quality is not as good as that from a corded handsfree set, I liken it listening FM radio with 0.5 MHz off the exact frequency -- lots of extra noise. However, a decent coversation can be carried out, and that's what matters. Do take note upon first use to lower the volume, as the default volume is a little too loud.

Did not know that there is this thing about Weblog Awards