My next cube neighbor suddenly called out to me as his Facebook turn Japanese.  Somehow, he was clicking some Japanese profile and his entire Facebook page just turn Japanese on him.  He called out to me on how to change it back to English.  After going through the settings with him, I suddenly got an evil genius idea, punk someone who did not lock his laptop and change his Facebook into a foreign language.   A couple of hours passed, too busy to punk anyone.  Then opportunity comes when I was on my way to a meeting.  This friend of mine left his laptop unlock and went for a tea brake.  To my surprise, his Facebook was open tug away in one of his multiple windows.  Immediately, I changed his language to Japanese.  Then it daunted to me that he might know how to read Chinese, which share many characters with Japanese, and so I changed his Facebook language to Korean, which I am pretty sure he does not know how to read.  Unfortunately, I was not there to witness his expression when he discover his Facebook page has turned Japanese.

I later checked out the other languages on Facebook and found that the layout in Arabic was mirrored on the vertical axis.  This makes the entire Facebook page looked totally foreign.  Changing just the language is already funny, imagine if get to change the layout to something different will draw a total blank look.  I hope the person falls off his chair.  And so my evil genius mind sets the target to find a victim tomorrow.  I just can’t wait.  Oh, I also need to check with my friend who got punk today, see what is his reaction.

Note To Self: Lock Notebook all the Time…

Update: It seams that Fans have been updating and deleting Wikipedia since the news come to light.

Offline – This feature enables your browser to download your mail box and makes it available offline.  Before this feature was available, I can only access my mailbox while I am online and I am forced to use third party mail client such as Outlook,  Windows Live Mail, Thunderbird, etc.  I’ve tried them all and end up using the gmail web interface for performance and I have also got used to the way the mails are being group together.  

Tasks – This is the one feature that I have been waiting for.  Before this, i have to use “Remember The Milk” through Firefox with addon.  The thing with Firefox is that it is slower than Chrome, and it has been bugging me for quite some time.  Now the labs are enabled on Google Apps, I have start to use back Chrome as my primary browser.

Message Translation – Now, this is one feature that I don’t really need it, but for the occasions that I receive mails from our China CM or Japanese customers, this pay prove to be handy.  It has yet to prove its worth, for now, I am enabling it to try it out.

Advance IMAP Controls – This is another feature that I seldom use, this is because I seldom access mail with Outlook.  The one particular feature that I like with this advance Imap control is the ability to choose which label to be shown through Imap.  This will help to reduce the load speed.  I usually only use Outlook to download mails to local drive to be archived in PST format.

Forgotten Attachment Detector – This is one important feature to have.  I have many occasions forgot to attach documents only to resend the same mail with attachment immediately.  This feature will help me to avoid such embarrassment in the future. 

Custom Label Colors – Immediately when I started to use Labels, I was craving for this feature.  The colors provided were fairly limited and was hard to find enough contrast of likeable colors to fill the mail box.  With this feature, I can customize my own colors, and enable me to fill my mail box with my own gordy colors instead of those created by someone else. 

Send & Archive – This is another productivity tool where it helps to reduce one step after I response to the mail, archive it.  I usually have to use the keyboard shot-cut to archive, now this helps me to save one step. 

Undo Send – Not that often, I have to recall mails due to no attachments, and due to some error of information.  This helps, if I notice that I should not send out the mail just yet within seconds of sending it.  I am trying out this feature to see if it is effective in saving me face..

Inserting images – This is one feature that elevates one primary frustration with gmail, that is the ability to attach pictures into the mail to illustrate important points.  Now I can explain better through mail.

Google Calendar Gadget – This helps to put my day in a single window and without having to open the calendar in a different tab.  This feature brings Google Apps – Gmail to be close to what Outlook offers, thought it could not match it, but atleast it put more functionality into gmail. 

Now I feel more complete with Gmail like never before and I can start to be more effective and manage my work more effectively.  Goodbye third party apps. 

A nifty tool from CNN Money to help you determine the state of your financial health.  It covers all area from Insurance to Retirement.  I didn’t know that I was not covering enough for my insurance.  I have also learnt that I am not saving enough for retirement.  I thought I was ok and I have a feeling that some parts of my financial health was a little inadequate, this tool points out which part were my weak points.  I recommend everyone to take a few minutes to use the tool to determine your financial health.  This is the first step you can take to take control of your financial situation. 

Link

The 21st Century Outsourcing phenomena have reached a new personal level. In the last 10 years, companies have been outsourcing jobs to 3rd world or to a cheaper provider. This probably inspired Thomas L. Friedman’s book on this subject. Just early in the year, I blog about my wife’s job being outsourced. Now, outsourcing becomes personal. Companies like AskSunday.com or GetFriday.com can help you complete task that you are too busy to do. Too busy to buy flowers for your Girl Friend? AskSunday.com can help. These companies market their services as Online/Virtual Personal Assistance, which in fact, are outsourcing your task to them. UK university students have been outsourcing their coursework to India, and there’s a term to this, ‘Contract Cheating’. So, if you have outsource all your task away, what do you do with all the extra time? Go play Pachinko?

This is my third term with Hive.com.my and I am getting irritated with the hosting speed. Dont know why, of late, my site have been loading so slowly that I could not get it validated at Google Webmaster Tool. the site loads > 10s, while some of the other top sites like 5xmom.com only loads within 3s. She was on a dedicated server and not sure how much her host cost. Hive.com.my can be considered on the entry/budget level, with only USD40/year, you get 5Gb of space, 50Gb of transfer, a whole lot of stuff and one free domain. Best deal around. Technical response was also fast and reliable. But all these doesn’t mean much if the site takes forever to load. Everytime I clicks any button on my wordpress, it takes almost a minute to load. I was listerning to ‘Arigatou’ from Kokia and it was half a song before I get to the write post page. Tell me how I can tolerate this.

I have feedback to the technical team over at hive and they responded that the speed was normal from their end. They have also tried to move me to another server and still the same. So, if they can’t work it out for me, I will work it out with other host. Then again, moving host is like moving home, full with ordeals. So, if you are looking for a host, do ensure you want to stay with them for long, else, it is much hassle to migrate. Like all moving homes events, there are head aches at every steps. Hey, maybe there is a business for this, professional moving, where we do the work, you just relax at the beach or listen to your favorite tune without any worry. Once done, we will notify you of your new password, etc.. sounds like a plan…

 

Windows trash can that is. For a coffee lover, it couldn’t trill me more to have a trash can with the starbucks brand trash can, a constant reminder to get my java to fuel my day…Speaking of starbucks, I was required to travel next week to audit one of the newly setup factory in China. Considering which hotel to stay at, the first thing I did was went to google map, and search for the city’s name. Next I type in ‘Starbucks’, to search for business at the city. To my dismay, the city was not listed in Google map, to have this service, too small, so I stayed in Shangri la ShenZhen without any starbucks near by. Fear not, there are 13 starbucks stores in ShenZhen, a quick cap will do my fix.

Get your trash can here.

After using WordPress for so long, I have got acustom of this CMS engine and grew out of Movable Type. My long standing photo blog which was previously powered by movable type have been migrated to wordpress. The migration was fairly simple, just export from MT and inport at WordPress and it was done. I manage to tweak the 555 photoblog theme to customize it to my liking and what you see above is the fruit of my customization. In addition, I have also moved from /pblog to the root of my domain. So, now who ever comes to wekgna.com will first come to my photo blog, which fits into what I want to maintain of my personal existance on the web. When I first start blogging years back, I hate to write, and I only post photos, and hence the my photoblog was born. I was on blogspot then. I could still remember, I first subscribe to a free host 100mb that host perl, and movable type was free for all at that time. I name my blog Sweet & Sour, witih the notion that life is full of sweet and sour memories, and they are captured through my photos. After some revisions of movable type upgrade, wordpress starts to spring up on the side. I started to use wordpress out of curiousity and created my ‘blog‘ named ‘My So Called Life’ with wordpress. By that time, I started to write more and took photo less. As my ‘blog’ on wordpress grew, my photoblog powered by movable type starts to be neglected. I have also moved into my own new domain called wekgna.com, which is my name spelled backwards. Not untill a few days ago I tried to post a photo and found issues with movable type. I have upgraded to the latest version and it seams to be so much complicated. So, I decided to ditch movable type and migrate my entire photoblog into wordpress. This brings us here today to this post. I would like to annouce that my old photoblog at wekgna.com/pblog has been shutdown, and now moved to the root of the domain, which is www.wekgna.com. Enjoy the photos, and subscribe for new postings if you like my style of photography.

I bought this book mainly to find out what my strengths were. I was intreague by the method how the queries were structured. I have done many of these kind of personality finder and they often allows you to think of whats right and whats wrong and your answer were skewed. The book on the whole does not worth a dime for it. It was first published in 2001 and extremely outdated. This was just on the book version and not actually the content. The book helped me to identify and realize what my strengths were. To the purpose of the book, it was extremely useful and it serves the purpose well. However, after reading to the middle of the book, which calls the reader to go online to take the strengthsfinder.com test, I found out that there is a newer book, titled Strenghsfinder 2.0, with an updated version of test and a structured method of improvement. Of which this version of book severely lacks. This book only helps you to realize who you are and stop short on that. It encourages you to go improve, but provide no means of achiving that. Therefore, my summary of this book is to bypass it, and go to the next stop, which is the latest and greatest version of the book Strengthsfinder 2.0. Rating of 4 star out of 5 for the content of the book, while I encourage to get the later version.

I have been wired for almost a year, after the Belkin router I bought in the US for only USD7 starts to act up. The router becomes unstable and keep dropping connections every 5 minutes. I gave the router to my sister in-law to use as LAN router, which works fine. We have been trawling long LAN cables around the house, and the laptop have been kept out of the bedroom, which is good. But this dry spell has come to an end today. While browsing around in Queensbay Mall, I came across this Aztech Wireless Router on sale, from a regular price of RM159, drop to RM99, which I thought was a great bargain. Just about a week ago, I pop into my friend’s computer shop at BJ and he was selling this very modem for RM159. He commented that this is the cheapest model around. He was also selling Belkin at RM169, which was a promo. I was thinking of getting that already. This was mainly because we have got tired of the messy wires at home. So, you can imagine my surprise when I saw this very wireless router for RM99. The setup was a breeze. Fire it up, plug in, goes into the router admin and setup the wireless encryption and whola, connected…