I’ll be back in March. Very soon. After I edit out a few posts that have been festering inside for awhile.

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A 33-YEAR-OLD man has come off second best after trying to karate chop a moving train at Eagle Junction station last night.
(Via)

Some of the comments:

It is wisely written that man who attack train is on the wrong track.

The stork you fool. Next time use the stork. It’s the only way to win.

No, no, no,,,my son. I said ‘go train’ not ‘go for train’. Must have been my accent.

The only man who can take down a train with his bare hands is Chuck Norris.

LOL.

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That’s why I’ve been pretty absent here.

But I will start blogging again soon. I’ve not been writing for oh so very long, but after literarily spewing privately, I’ve suddenly found the dams broken.

Isn’t it funny how after a dry and barren spell of wordlessness, after the first words are cast, a deluge starts flowing?

Words and sentences swim around in my head, reminding me that I am by trade a wordsmith. Haunting me. Tormenting me. Depriving me of sleep.

I love how words play on each other and sentences form, making meaning out of nothing. The English language is much unlike the Chinese one, so unsuccinct and unable to stand alone. But if put together the right way, is pure poetry and music to the ear.

I was told before, in my creative writing class, that I was a poet, not a storyteller. I think that was the death of my fiction writing. I’ve tried to write again over the years, but nothing comes out. Till today, I abhor the need to grade one’s art. Journalistic writing, writing as a craft, is one thing. But writing as an art is another.

But maybe, because I am a poet that no longer rhymes, I might still be able to pull sentences out of my arse that might move the everyday man.

This I hope.

Screw creative writing classes.

Writing has always been self-indulgent. I should probably learn to indulge myself once in a while, instead of being ever so cautious.

However, I started this blog with an aim to NOT be self indulgent in my writing. That is still best left for private journalling. But, this blog is my anvil, and life is my hammer. And only by using it can I hone my pen (or keyboard) into a worthy blade.

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This is a holiday, and Lord knows my boyfriend and I need one.

It has been an eventful year. Life isn’t always fair. Massive upheavals have happened recently that need to be mulled over and decided how to act on. Until then, this is going to be a real and well deserved holiday.

(While we work on some things and prepare for the coming year.)

Evildoers beware! – Daisy, from Neil Gaiman’s “Anansi Boys”.

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I started using feed readers around 2006 to keep up with the burst of blogs that suddenly permeated the internet. It was all the craze then, and everyone had a blog. My feed reader consisted mostly of friends and fellow bloggers that I met through the Project Petaling Street community. It was a brave new world then.

Nowadays, most of my friends have stopped blogging, and their section in the feed reader is woefully silent. The feeds that are updated the most are usually informative blogs, and other websites that use RSS feeds.

If my feed reader was a coffee shop, it’s an entirely different crowd now. There are a few regulars from the old days, but the place is mostly buzzing with a different type of read and feed now.

Things have changed.

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This site has been through a couple of revisions, and is still a work in progress. But after some soul searching and some revelations, I now know exactly where to take it.

It’s already shaping up to be the final product… And will get there soon.

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Those lists are entertaining, and do have a massive ring of truth to them, but they seem to come across as “don’t do this, it’s annoying.” If you used those lists as a guideline to what not to do on Facebook, you might as well delete your account and have no social media presence. Silence is the least annoying option.

If you’re going to be on social media, it’s inevitable you’re going to annoy someone. And that all those Facebook user type lists are all written with a bias , depending on the type of Facebook user writing them (and mostly by the crusty old media stereotype writer).

So to me, I say “be yourself”. If you annoy one person, who cares. After all, Facebook wouldn’t be one great melting pot if we didn’t have all kinds. If you annoy tons of people, okay….maybe there’s something there you should really fix.

Now that we got that out of the way, here’s my biased list examining the type of people that sign up for Facebook:

1. The businessman – He read somewhere that he could leverage it for business, and then got an account and started brainstorming of ways he could use it to make money and generate leads, but complete missed the point of it being a “social network”.

2. The parent - Got an account because a younger (but not kids age young) relative sent them an invite to show off family photos. Doesn’t really know how to use Facebook, until their kid shows them the joys of Pet Society and Farmville.

3. The academic - see Businessman. Also is on it out of curiousity, and because everyone and their dog is talking about it, so they decided that they’d better write a thesis on it before a rival academic does.

4. The genuine friender – Migrated from Friendster/Hi5/other older social network when everyone on their “friend” list started doing so, mainly to keep in contact with all their friends. Thinks all the above are old fogeys going gaga at a novelty site. Facebook is a product of their generation, so pardon them if they feel a sense of ownership of social media and all that jazz. (And here’s Time sticking it back on behalf of old fogeys).

5. The meet-new-people-er – Joined Facebook because they needed more friends, not because they wanted to connect with existing ones. You’ll usually find them friending a female with a decently good-looking profile picture going, “Can I be your friend?”

So there’s my unabashedly biased list.

And I might just write my also unabashedly biased list of Facebook etiquette rules one of these days.

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And then my laptop started acting funny, so I got a desktop and the laptop went to servicing and then got taken over by my mom. And my boyfriend grumbled to no end about lugging a 3.3 kg desktop replacement around with him across two countries. So in the spur of the moment, I went and got us a mini Eee PC.

It wasn’t exactly an impulse buy. We had been talking about netbooks and debating their merits for quite awhile now. I had also been doing my research on netbooks, in the event of us actually getting one. We’re a very prepared couple that way haha. And according to most reviews, the best netbooks were the MSI Winds and the Asus Eee PCs. The former for power, and the latter for battery life.

I’ve been using the new Eee PC for about two weeks now, and I am very very very pleased with my purchase. Details below:

Specs on my model:

Operating System: Windows 7 Starter
Display: 10.1″ LED Backlight WSVGA Screen (1024×600)
Intel CPU & Chipset: Intel® Atom™ N270
Memory: 1GB DDR2 SO-DIMM
Hybrid Storage: 250GB HDD
Wireless Data Network: WLAN 802.11n @2.4GHz
Camera: 1.3M Pixel
Audio Hi-Definition Audio CODEC
Stereo speaker
Digital Array Mic
Input / Output 1 x VGA Port (D-sub 15-pin for external monitor)
3 x USB 2.0
1 x LAN RJ-45
2 x Audio Jack (Head Phone / Mic-in)
Card Reader: MMC/ SD(SDHC)
Battery: 8.5 hrs, 6-Cell 48Wh Li-ion Battery
Dimensions: 262mm(W) x 178mm(D) x 25.9mm~ 36.5mm(H)
Weight: 1.27Kg (with 6-Cell Battery)

I got this for $568 at JB HiFi after haggling with the guy who sold it to me. It’s now retailing there for $598 at the moment.

I was actually going to buy the older model which had slightly longer battery life but less memory, but it turns out that the previous model was almost $200 more expensive than the new one they had in stock, so naturally I settled for this model.

So….what’s the lowdown?

What I really like:

1. LONG battery life. It says that it lasts 8.5 hours, and it actually does. On the lowest power setting. ALTHOUGH, that power setting is enough for most net surfing and word processing. I usually have it on the highest setting, and it lasts approximately 6.5 hours – still more than enough time to cram in a good chunk of computer time.

2. Fast start up time – It’s running on Windows 7 Starter, which means that its functions are limited, and that I can’t change the desktop background (that’s a minor irritation), but the startup time is comparable to starting up a phone. It’s good to go in approximately half a minute, and takes another approximate half minute for the net to connect.

3. It fits into my handbags! And doesn’t break my back in the process of carrying it. Nuff sed. =D

4. Decently spaced keyboard. Another main reason I got this netbook was to be able to work and write on the go, so a good keyboard was essential to me. I tried touch typing with a couple of netbooks while I was out hunting for them, and the Eee PC was the one I was most comfortable typing with. I type pretty fast, and my fingers tend to fly across the keyboard, and this was the only keyboard that was of optimal space for me to do so. On the HP Minin0te, I kept hitting the wrong keys because they were spaced too close for comfort.

What I wasn’t so keen about:

1. The multi-touch touchpad. It’s a cool concept, and face it, it’s trying to be a Mac (take note, anyone who wants to do a Hackintosh on any netbook – try the Eee PC). BUT, I can hardly tell where the touchpad starts and ends, and have left the original sticker on so I can tell where it actually does. And it also means that I always accidentally zoom in and out without warning when I’m typing. And it just happened again while I was typing this paragraph. Plus, it isn’t immediately responsive as well. Something for Asus to iron out for its newer models.

2. The teeny screen size. Then again, I get what I pay for, so this complaint isn’t all that valid.

3. Windows Live Messenger. I know this isn’t a complaint about the computer, but it’s related. I’m (and probably half the world) a big Windows Live Messenger (previously MSN Messenger) user, and I was pretty happy when it came pre-installed with this computer. However, when I tried to tweak the options for the program, I found out that the resolution of the screen size prevented me from seeing the bottom of the screen, and to “apply” or “save” changes, I had to hit enter, and pray that everything worked. Microsoft, make your programs netbook friendly or else Google will take over!!!

4. It’s a little slow in rendering Flash sites. I played Desktop Tower Defense in slow mo last night. =P

Conclusion?

In all, I am quite pleased with our purchase. The netbook is perfect for surfing the net, and typing notes and reading e-mails on the fly. It starts up very fast, and in comparision to my old Toshiba Satellite which was plagued with problems towards the end of the first year and took 5 minutes to start up anyway, as well as having a battery life of one and a half hours, this is a massive improvement.

Plus, the Seashell looks much better than their cheaper looking older models. Call me shallow, but I like my mobile computers pretty as well as functional.

This Eee PC performs well for it’s specs, does what it’s built to do pretty well – word processing and net surfing, and for that I couldn’t really ask for more for a computer it’s size.

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Web standards are there for a reason – to maintain standards! Hacks are fine, IF the designer knows what they’re doing, and will take the future of the website into account. Don’t make editing in the future hard for everyone else!

PLUS, if the website was originally designed in one way, FIND out how it was designed FIRST, and then edit accordingly. DO NOT break convention, because when the next person comes along and tries to edit it the way it was originally intended to be edited, they’re going to have a massive headache.

No wonder everyone’s moving to a CMS. Not everyone is well-equipped enough to deal with CODE.

Coding is like chemistry. Mix it wrongly and it’ll blow up in your face. No wonder everyone likes to stick to pre-mixed formulas, so they don’t have to deal with the nitty gritty of the mix.

Coders, you have more in common with lab pharmacists than you think.

Unfortunately, there are still people out there who are code cowboys, and think that because they know HTML 1.0 and CSS 1.0 they can edit XHTML and CSS 3.0. And that’s when the big picture gets messy. Sure, it fixes the little details, but what about the rest of the website??? You know the chaos theory? A website is a little self-contained chaos theory demonstrator. Have one little thing out of place and the entire thing goes to shot.

Ok. Rant over. Back to work!

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But this is my site, and what it should really be is reflect MEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! And because I’m human, there are too many aspects to me to categorise and classify.

Wheeeee!!!!

Henceforth it shall be rebranded as “the online repository of all things useful and useless”!

All part of The Journey!

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