Nice quotes from spam comments

This blog has become a receiver of spam comments. Instead of just wasting my time rejecting each as they appear, not wanting to waste the good part of the comments, so I am posting here the nice quotes in these spam comments:

• 不論做什麼事，相信自己，別讓別人的一句話，把你擊倒。
• 心中醒，口中說，紙上作，不從身上習過，皆無用也。
• 雖天地之大，萬物之多，而惟吾蜩翼之知。
• 河水永遠是相同的，可是每一剎那又都是新的。
• 一個人的價值，應該看他貢獻了什麼，而不是他取得了什麼。
• 一棵樹除非在春天開了花，否則難望在秋天結果。
• 死亡是悲哀的，但活得不快樂更悲哀。

Never go down. Never slow down.

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Finally, after so many years using Google Adsense, I experimented and found that really a single click can earn money. Now, I need to figure out how to increase the chance of visitor clicking on the ads.

Time to change my phone

Is there only one ang mo girl in Singapore? No. But there is this AngMoGirl that I follow in twitter, and now I find her in Omnia II Blog ErVolution - Do the Write Thing. She is one of the contestants. The others are ... Yutaki, Fauzi, Ms Glitzy and Alton.

This is a contest held for the launch of Sumsung Omnia II touch screen phone.

I have been a Nokia user since the era of 3810, and also somehow reluctant to try out touch screen phone. However, it seems the day is near for me to change to a touch screen. It is also about time as my current N80ie is about time to retire.

Actually, my colleague recommended Samsung to me just a few days ago, and now I stumbled on to this sponsored opportunity by Samsung. The chance is higher now for me to seriously consider switching phone, brand, style, and OS. In other words, I need to overcome my reluctant to switch to a different brand, style and OS.

Let see... I should like to have things like Windows Mobile ® 6.1 Professional OS; Camera Shot Modes like Face Detection, Smile shot, Panorama shot, Action shot, Mosaic shot, WDR, Anti-Shake; FM Radio Recording.

Highlighting some online entries about GPF Malaysia

• GPF 2008 - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
• Global Peace Festival 2008
• Things I never experienced!
• Global Peace Festival 2008 - Concert (Part B)
• ~GPF OvER~
• Global Peace Festival 2008 Day 2 Part 1: Celebration at Stadium Putra, Bukit Jalil
• Global Peace Festival 2008 Day 2 Part 2: Celebration at Stadium Putra, Bukit Jalil
• Global Peace Festival 2008 Day 2 Part 3: Celebration at Stadium Putra, Bukit Jalil
• GPF 2008 Day 1 Part 1: Community Service Project at Taman Bukit Angkasa, Kampung Kerinchi, KL.
• GPF 2008 Day 1 Part 2: Community Service Project at Taman Bukit Angkasa, Kampung Kerinchi, KL.
• GPF Concert was THE BOMB.
• Service For Peace (GPF) - 18th October 2008
• chill
• GPF Malaysia 19 October 2008, Stadium Putra, Bukit Jalil
• Global Peace Festival 2 - Concert (Part A)
• Lots of 'em put GPF 2008 as the title, But I'm not.
• Global Peace Festival 2008, Malaysia
• GPF 2008 Day 1 Part 1: Community Service Project at Taman Bukit Angkasa, Kampung Kerinchi, KL.
• SFP @ Bukit Angkasa (18th Oct 2008)
• GPF designing work for IUSA.
• Global Peace Festival 2008. Join now! Invitation is to all UCSI students.
• Schedule for Week 42 & Week 43
• Peace Celebration 2008
• Never Leave Life With Regret!!
• Global Peace Festival 2008 in Malaysia.
• Where Peace Begins
• I’m promoting GPF Malaysia!
• PTUM
• Global Peace Festival 08

Would appreciate help from anyone to keep this list updated if you know of more, Thanks!

Replicating Paris Vélib' in Singapore

Interested people please contact kaustuvghosh1972 :)

The new CEPAS-compliant ez-link card

I read a letter in TodayOnline about the new CEPAS-compliant ez-link card by LTA. The author claimed that the new card would require him to make more top-ups. I scratched my head..

In the old system, there is a S$3 deposit and when stored value (excluding the deposit) is less than S$0, one cannot board a MRT train or bus.

In the new system, there won't be any deposit, and when stored value is less than S$3, one cannot board a MRT train, while for buses, minimum stored value must be more than that required for the rest of the journey of the bus.

I really don't see this change can lead to more frequent top-ups necessary for anyone. ... why? The current top-up procedure ask how much one wants to top-up. Thus, regardless if there is deposit, or the amount of deposit, or the amount of minimum value (for MRT), there is no reason to do more top-ups. Unless, the author has been using a procedure that I have not come across where he was asked how much stored value he wants in the card, and he doesn't intend to change this amount when using the new card. However, I don't think there is such a procedure.

Even for those who mainly travel by bus, they may instead top up lesser, but by only 0.1 top-up lesser assuming that their minimum value is S$2 instead of 3 and each time they do S$10 top-up.

However, if the S$3 deposit on existing EZ-Link card will not be refunded, then yes. Similarly, it would still be just an additional 0.3 top up, using the above assumptions.

I believe there are many not so good or correct letters sent by many, but to be selected for publication is slightly more than the common excuse of human err. Instead of thinking that it was some mistakes by the editors, I suspect it was intentional to create some heated discussions. They are facing low volume of letters to Voices and needed to take articles without asking from blog. There is one from reclaimed.wordpress.com but I couldn't find the article in this inactive blog.

By the way, I pity the LTA and TransitLink being wrongly accused by many. From what I understand, it was the IDA initiative and directive to adopt the CEPAS standard that led to the change, while many unhappy comments were targetted at TransitLink and LTA.

Long break from blogging; a trip to Korea

Dear readers (as if there are :)),

Just a note to say that the long break from blogging was due to my overseas trip to Gapyeong, Guri, and Seoul from end of July till early August.

Previously I had the impression that having an address in Korea may not guarantee that you can find the place. Now, an address + GPS in taxi, it is quite guaranteed, provided the address is written/spelt correctly.

Since I couldn't find South Korea map in Google Maps, so I thought there isn't any such information online. However, my friend manage to find it here, although it seems to be only in Korean.

Help others to help everyone

I think there is a saying, "feed the cow if you want milk". This is what I felt when I look into this service, Zookoda. It is an email marketing application designed specifically for bloggers. Zookoda enables you to send a daily, weekly or monthly summary of your latest blog posts directly into your visitors' inbox.

Now, the important part is: ... it’s all FREE! Is this a free lunch? Isn't there no such thing as a free lunch?

Consider the above phrase, would you charge your cow for the food you provide to it? Thus, I guess that's why it is free. This can be considered as a type of investment. Just as those countries that subsidized heavily for all their citizens to get educated. Here, it is more like a company that is building up an industry, the industry that it is in.

The parent company is into online advertisement, particularly advertising in blogs. With this free tool, it is helping bloggers to improve their blogs readerships, and this translates into an increase in the value of the advertising time and space of the blogs. This should grow their revenue through growing the industry.

More importantly, as bloggers, we can benefit a lot from Zookoda that enables us to:

• Manage email newsletter subscribers
• Enhance your blog with custom newsletter subscription forms
• Design eye-catching newletters to match your blog design
• Schedule recurring broadcasts for each day, week or month
• View real-time open, bounce, click and unsubscribe reports
• Access mobile users by emailing blog content in text format

It's getting more difficult to stay home

This blog title, Trying to stay home.... interests me. In the blogosphere, there are many moms, and specifically stay at home moms. I thought historically it is natural and right for moms to stay at home. However, this modern, or should I said twisted world ... is making it so difficult for moms to stay at home.

My wife recently mentioned to me she felt her native country Malaysia seems to be lagging behind because her Malaysia friends find it strange that why isn't she working as if she is supposed to work. Whereas here, most will envy her for being able to stay at home.

Nevertheless, staying at home doesn't mean not earning money :) Many moms in the blogosphere will agree.

However, earning money shouldn't be the focus. What's importance is our contribution to the society and world. To us, investing in the upbringing of our children is much more valuable than earning money. Unless, the job or work one does outside benefits the world and society in a greater and significant way, such as running a charity.

Being different has a price

Someone called kishore who is interested in collecting new cracked mobile softwares for nokia mobiles invited me to visit his blog on s60v3 applications. Happily I paid a visit there but sadly I read about an online TV application that supports on all NOKIA N-SERIES mobiles with resolution 240x320. And supports on N95, N93 and N82.

What!!! N80 is not supported? If it was due to older model, I am fine with that. However, it was about ... resolution, and not that N80 has a lower resolution. Instead, N80 has a higher but too uniquely kind of resolution: 352x416. First I encounter this was the application pfingo, and now this!

I don't think it is difficult to make such applications work on a higher resolution, but I know it is not about technical difficulty. It is more about commercial profitability.

No free lunch? How about music?

Yes! Get free music at Sites and Sounds! That's what this very recently (May 2008) started blog is about: to bring you cool music and sites from around the web. Here are some tracks available for downloading ... that are featured on the sites are:

• By Jeff Merchant - Li’l Miss Riding Hood / Landlord Song / Sick Of It / You Can’t Save Me
  
• By Megaphone - Not your Enemy / Stain / Drama Queen
  
• By Louise Mosrie - Complicated / Rockslide / Never Gonna be the one
  
• By Chester Bennington - Let Down
  
• By Jason Silver - Time will Tell / Lover’s Road
  
• By Assembly of Dust - BootLegger’s Advice / Grand Design / Lone Tree / Leadbelly
  
• By Eric Nicholas - Lost inside your Eyes / Song for my Future Wife
  
• By Billie the Vision & The Dancers - Absolutely, Salutely

I am sure you will find more when you visit Sites and Sounds.

Frankly, I am not into music and art. I am much better in mathematics. Nevertheless, I think I have picked up more knowledge about music last few years by watching those singing/talent competition shows with emphasis on judges' comments. I supposed it all started by the American Idol show.

I would love to have the lyrics together with the songs. Hope they can have a section on lyrics, or are there copyrights issue for lyrics?

PS: Not only did I Discover New and Free music at Sites and Sounds, I also discovered TimeTube - Timeline for YouTube, which I find quite interesting.

Read about Symbian here

s603rd.blogspot.com is a blog that talks about Symbian OS, the OS in Nokia Nseries. I shall be visiting it often as I have been a user of N80 for about 1.5 years, and a friend just bought a N82 recently. My next phone, hopefully in a few months time could be ...
N83, if it is ready. I like Symbian OS as it is specially designed for its intended use rather than by modifying from an existing OS. Similar reason why I like gmail.

From the blog's tags, I recognize that N80 is history as it is not appearing as a tag there. A particular article that I enjoyed is NSeries - How it all began.

From it, I learn more about myself: an early adopter when it comes to technology and innovation; gadget freaks and technology stylists who are always on the look out for new devices and gadgets.

I also learn that Nokia Nseries are multimedia computers. In the 90's, I had an idea of introducing mobile phone into computers just like sound card was introduced into PC in the 80's. I didn't expect that the opposite happened. Computer was introduced into mobile phones. I guess the trend of introducing mobile phone into PDA achieved lesser degree of acceptance than giving a phone the computing power.

Transiting into the next chapter

It has been exactly two months since I last saw this state:where all earnings are paid. It means that I haven't been able to grab any opportunity from PayPerPost for more than a month :)

This may be the end of getting opportunities from PayPerPost, after my PR was hammered down from 3 to zero in January.

I hope the next chapter with SocialSpark will be a prosperous one :)

An innovative platform for bloggers

I am happy to tell people about SocialSpark! I have been seeing this name for many months, wondering what is it but didn't really read up about it. Finally, I was among the very first people they invited to join in their invite-only Alpha version 9 Apr. Since then, I started to understand better about them through own experience in using it.

They have started the successful PayPerPost about 2 years ago, recently launched IZEArank, and now this latest brainchild ... what's this brainchild about?. After using it, I think I have a much better idea of what is SocialSpark.

There are many community sites such as friendster, and the very recent FaceBook. I think SocialSpark is also a kind of community site -- community of bloggers. Doesn't matter if you are interested in blogging for money, you can too join. As it itself is not a blogging platform, unlike most community sites that also offers a blogging features, you don't need to create and maintain another blog to interact with the bloggers here. You can also list your blogs from various blogging platforms here.

As for those interested in blogging for money, you will like this very innovative place for you to earn, both by advertising for other people, or advertise your own blog or products to increase your revenue.

SocialSpark allows several types of opportunities. Other than normal money paying per post type called sponsored posts, there are also blog sponsorships where you allow a 'welcome mat' and persistent sponsorship banner on your blog for a period of time. Also, there are Sparks, which are free opportunities that serve as ideas/topics for blog posts, but many offer to blog you back if you blog about the suggested topic.

Closing of a chapter, hopefully not yet...

It has been many months since I last saw this state:
where all earnings are paid. It means that I haven't been able to grab any opportunity from PayPerPost for more than a month :)

This may be the end of being paid to blog, after my PR was hammered down from 3 to zero in January. I hope not. Shall see.

Exceeded 200!!

Not long after I moved into 2nd gear, my earnings from blogging exceeded USD100!

That took me slightly more than 4 months at 1st gear.

Today, just slightly over a month at 2nd gear, my earnings from blogging in my PayPal account exceeded US$200 yesterday!! Actually, my earnings had exceeded US$200 on the 8 Feb, the date after which I am able to withdraw the US$25 I have won in the Aductions Review Competition in January.

I shall remain at 2nd gear before I figure out how to move on to 3rd gear.

Purpose of rules

When each rule is being formalized, it has clear purpose during the time that they were being set. However, circumstances change, and usually more rules are added, or rules are being enhanced to tackle these changes. Similarly, some rules may become obsolete, or doesn't correctly achieve the original purpose. However, due to less urgency to look into obsolete rules, many of these remain and create unnecessary restrictions.

E.g. the 1955 rules about no cycling on pedestrian paths here. Firstly, 1955 is more than half a century ago. Secondly, this nation was underdeveloped then and has been a developed nation for about a decade. Thirdly, the meaning of pedestrian path in 1955 is different from now in many new towns where pedestrian paths are much wider.

Many a times, ... in order not to have these restrictions, the regulatory bodies ignore such obsolete rules, but this gives the wrong impression that the regulatory bodies are powerless or all rules can be ignored.

Actually, the reason that triggered me to write this post is a recent interaction with PayPerPost. My post, Yummy citrus-marinated flame-grilled chicken, was first rejected due to their suspicion that the post before it, Accountable advertising is a sponsored post. Later, they give me the benefit of doubt on my statement that the latter post is not a sponsored post. However, I re-dated the post, which was a remedy action I queried about together in my statement to them, and they didn't warn me that it was not allowed. Sadly, that yummy post was rejected due to this.

I respect their rules, and their need to enforce it by rejecting my post. However, I believe it is clear that I do not have any intention to try to do something that the rule is there to prevent, which I've yet to figure out. I also believe that there isn't any harm done to anyone during the short period when my post was re-dated and again re-dated back to the original date.

This post is triggered by the above incident, but it is not directed to PayPerPost. Rules are good because there are clear and many of them can be enforced by computer. Yet, we are humans. We create rules for us to have guidelines, but not to absolutely follow them. When applying rules, we need to exercise our wisdom, which the computer still lack behind us a lot, to decide if an act is rightfully against the purpose of a certain rule.

PS: A realisation from this. PayPerPost's Customer Love really loves their customers, and bloggers/posties are not their customers, but suppliers.

Can I say that to have intimacy is to infect each other?

In an excerpt, Homosexuals Squelch Facts About MRSA Outbreak, of an article in CNSNews.com:

But the media are now obscuring that fact, according to Matt Barber, director of cultural policy for Concerned Women for America (CWA).
“The real story here is the way that the media have whitewashed this outbreak,” Barber told Cybercast News Service. “It is amazing to see what they’ve done with this.”…

and ...

Medically speaking, any break in the skin that is exposed to the organism can then set off an infection, which can destroy “a lot of tissue” before it’s brought under control, [Internationally known infectious disease specialist Dr. John] Diggs said.

Since the main media have whitewashed such news due to concerns about political correctness, let the side media like bloggers who do not have political correctness concerns spread these important information out.

Looking at the medical perspective on infection, it seems like most intimacy behaviors are acts of infecting the other party. Thus, having only one partner in one's lifetime is a smart choice!

Tag cloud / label cloud

Notice the cloud of words at the top of my blog? Thanks to phydeauz3 blog for providing the codes and detail instructions here.