tentang My Scott Pilgrim Avatar Fun

saw this link at baliomegatron's twitter.. i cant help myself. just felt i had to make one too! lol

mine sucks but did not want to go overboard with it :P

make yours!

tentang Reminder For Online Shoppers

blogwalking today i found ajjah's entry about her recent problem with her purchases she made online. i think it is a very good thing to be aware of and shared with others

on her blog she wrote of how this so called 'distribution' company people managed to get hold of the things she bought from overseas while it was at the customs'. and how they tried to scam her to pay more money for the taxes (that she was expecting to pay anyway).

so do read her whole experience here


i do hope people won't be scared off from buying things online. it is enough problems about people falsely advertising things and scamming online to get hold of ur credit card number, now this. i do hate scammers. and they think they can't be caught.

thanks to ajjah for sharing the info.


and an entry by editor d_tieah at 100penulis.com about her experience being scammed can be read here (link).


maybe in the future, we'll be better prepared to deal with these people if they targeted us. and maybe make them stop doing these things and realize 'hey people are harder to get scammed' and hopefully they'll stop trying to >_<

tentang Say No To Click Fraud

this is not a new issue but lately, this issue have been discussed a bit more by blogs that i visit. and today i noticed at nuffnang's blog there is a post about this as well. maybe they decided that click fraud is getting more rampant

We understand that some of you may just be anxious about earning some side income from displaying the banner ads, but do note that this is in fact a violation of our Terms & Conditions under Section 6

- Nuffnang blog

ok blogging is not just writing. there's ethics and responsibilities involved. some of it just makes you a rude person or unethical when you go against it. but some of it, like cheating on your advertisers about the amount of clicks the banner gets from your site; will effect the advertising company which will effect everyone else. what i'm trying to say is, cyber crimes like click fraud is a big deal. sorry.. a huge deal

say no to click fraud

if you are new to blogging or new to putting ad banners on your established blog, please know what click fraud is. wait.. even if you're not new to these things, please know that click fraud is hurting everyone, at your expense.

so,
say no to click fraud

every blogger who has ad banners on thier blog should know how bad click fraud is to everyone. when the ads isn't reaching the masses (but most of it always goes to these fraudsters instead) the advertisers will lose money (yes.. advertising costs money). and when they don't like it, they will advertise less. which will effect nuffnang.com (or advertlets, or adsense, etc) and they will earn less. which means less money for blogs with ad banners. if too much click fraud happening, it could actually cripple the whole thing and everyone will end up earning nothing.

again, if you see groups that to go around clicking ads, tell them that it is a cyber crime. say no to click fraud. warnings have been published by NN and a lot of people have been caught. they have a way to find these frauds.

read full nuffnang announcement here
or the translation here (via poet dusun bayu)

^^

tentang When Halo Goes Bollywood

this is IGN's april fools trailer. they do this every year. of course it's not the real thing. but it is funny as hell and something pretty good to share.

and the amount of work they actually put in it to make this pretty decent looking video is awesome.

^^

tentang Leaked Alternate Eclipse Trailer

we can find awesome things on youtube.. especially when we weren't looking for it. so today i found this pretty cool vid. who knew they have such a cool soundtrack!! the trailer starts like the official trailer that is released but some things probably kinda looked too like a fanmade video.

but like all leaked video, this one could be removed if more people complained and try to get it removed. so watch it quick before it's gone guys! ..i mean gals!

Supposed Leaked Trailer-



so what do you think? :D

tentang Things You Steal Daily

i don't want to preach. i just want to state the obvious. and there are people who don't know that this what a lot of bloggers do is wrong. but fact is, if you do it, you the owner and people who work on that product could come after you and sue you.

i'm talking about distributing copyrighted materials, illegally.
in other words, piracy.


Do you know that :-

it is wrong to download songs and movies and programs from the internet without paying for it. unless it is distributed free by the copyright holder or third party who is distributing it legally. the copyright holder may not come after you if you download a song illegally but go after the distributor instead, but be aware that you can be charged just for downloading.

it is wrong to distribute copyrighted materials without consent of the copyright holder. a lot of bloggers host, or provide links to download songs illegally. be aware that the blogger that owns that blog could be charged, it doesn't matter if the blogger was the one who put the link or someone put it in the comments section. but the owner must be responsible.


Backups.
if you decide to backup (make a copy of) your DVD or games installer or music CDs, it is fine. but do not distribute it. treat it like the real thing. it is your responsibility.

if the backup copy you made (with your name written on it) ended up in the hands of some piracy ring and because you made such a good job ripping, they used you back up as the master copy, produced millions of pirated copy, and sold them world wide. if the piracy ring gets busted, you could be charged too.

unlikely, i know. but it can happen


it is not a good feeling anyway when people like me, walking past pirated DVD of a movie i worked on. and knowing full well the sale of that pirated DVD is not helping the company.

so my blogger friends, please stop putting those illegal download links. sounds fun. but it is wrong.



tips: if you want to share a music for friends to view on your blog, use sites like youtube.com. because there is a copyright issue, youtube will remove it. so if it's there on youtube, it is pretty safe to share.

tentang 82nd Oscar Quotes

still on the 82nd annual Academy Awards topis :P. here's some quotes from the awards night that i find really interesting.

I think the secret to directing is collaborating and I had truly an extraordinary group of collaborators in my crew.

— Kathryn Bigelow, Best Director for The Hurt Locker

..so if you’re out there and you’re listening, listen to me: If you want to be creative, get out there and do it. It’s not a waste of time. Do it. OK?

— Michael Giacchino, Best Score for Up

My advice to young film-makers is: the tools never make great films,
it's what you do with the tools. Telling a great story, entertaining
the audience. That's what is gonna win you an academy award.

— John Lasseter

and the promo video for the awards night. a short vid.. nothing much but i really like the colour. i know it's purple but i really like the tone and all.


more Quotes here (via telegraph.co.uk)
^^

tentang Pranks

i'm not normally amused by pranks. i find pranks rather juvenile and very close to stupid. it is almost rare to find good silly and fun pranks. pranks to me should make the target feel shocked and helpless (kinda) and never make them feel embarresed. mean pranks are (kinda) acceptable but rude pranks just crossed the line.

bottom line, pranks should always be harmless and never having the target get a change of clothes or a bath or anything.

but saw this prank on tv the other day and i think it is cruelly awesome. i would NOT want to be the guy in the vid.


now.. what better than Japanese TV show pranks ^^

tentang cutest I'm Yours cover

one week and over 4 million hits on youtube.com
and it is the #21 - Most Subscribed (All Time) (Japan)
^^

he is a 5 year old japanese boy who learned to play the ukelele just a year ago.
source - http://www.youtube.com/uke3453

tentang The Day Yahoo! Fail

woke up this morning and as usual.. got online and check my email. oh wait.. my yahoo ID does not exist.

i have had that ID since 2001!

okay maybe something's wrong with my email account. lets try logging in through my yahoo!messenger.

another error.. but this time a little bit more.. it says my ID does not exist. error code 81003001

WTF!

so what is 81003001? lets yahoo search (because the yahoo homepage is already loaded) that shall we?

no reliable answer. pfft!

maybe somethings wrong with my computer. lets do a quick registry cleanup and scan if there's any trojan in here.

done! no trojan. reboot.
..done!
try to login... still get error ID doesn't exist.

okay.. lets do a quick search for any yahoo.com server errors in the news online.
found nothing.

lets look at twitter if anyone else is having the same problem. (search yahoo on twitter)

whoa.. there's a lot of "anyone else have problem logging in to yahoo?"
jackpot!



the phone rang and it was my wife. she's at her lab and she told me she couldnt check her email and wanted to know if i have the same problem. having just read all this complaints on twitter.. i managed to explain what probably happened. my wife could always count on my XDXD

apparently most of the people who were having problems logging in to yahoo (after checking their twitter profile) are from australia. maybe it is because people here are already up and have started working.. and it is still too early in the morning everywhere else. thats just me speculating.

my quick search on twitter shows me there's people in korea having the same problem as well.. and a guy in Tehran said he cant login because his ID apparently doesn't exist, so he made a new account on yahoo. after all the necessary steps done, he tried to login.. and the new one doesnt exist aswell

yahoo FAIL

and while i was writing this post.. i tried one more time to login to yahoo and everything was fine again. it was around 11.30am here in adelaide (GMT+9.30). thank god!

now.. if it was a server maintenance, dont a huge company like yahoo would've thought to inform their users that there is a maintenance? instead of the users getting some error like hey we dont have ur account here.

or just a simple "we're having technical issues right now and we are working on it right now. thank you for your patience" would have been alright. pfft



..resume normal life.

tentang Cool Thing Out of Twitter

i have always wanted to read Neil Gaiman's novels. when i get bored sometimes i'd go to the book store and read a chapter.. sometimes one of his short stories.. but i never got the opportunity to own his books (hmmm..). i like to read but when i read i would wanna read every single word. i never skim through pages, skip chapters or even read the last page.

maybe i shouldn't appreciate words too much eh?

anyway.. Neil Gailman (author of Stardust, Sandman series, American Gods), or @neilhimself on twitter.com, started an online interactive storytelling via Twitter.com few days ago and it is spreading real quick. he started his story with a short line :

Sam was brushing her hair when the girl in the mirror put down the hairbrush, smiled & said, "We don't love you anymore."

and the rest of the story will be up to you, me, ellen degeneres, anyone and everyone (who have twitter account).

so after about 1000 tweets.. the people at BBC Audiobooks America (BBCAA) will edit, compile and make an audiobook suppossedly free for download at their website.. or for purchase at iTunes.

when i first read about this yesterday.. they have already got to chapter 4 (in only two days!). i think this is a great idea.. a book (audiobook for this matter) something good that comes out of the internet. will it be a great story? possibbly not. but if it is good enough and one day someone decided to make a film out of it.. imagine how long the credits would be.. and imagine having your twitter username in it! pretty cool eh?

read more about how it works here (BBCAA Blog)
and summary of Scene 1,2 and 3 (BBCAA Blog)

click here to view the latest prograss of the story #bbcawdio on twitter.com

tentang Blog Music Players

those things are freaking annoying!!! i think bloggers use those players think that it is cool and sometimes cute. well.. in certain circumstances, they could be right. but i think most of the time it is useless and only cause harm to the blogs hits.

most of the blogs who have these players are by very young people, first time bloggers, or bloggers who dont really care about their site's hit counts and load time. using the term n00b could be a bit harsh but.. yeah.


so, why i hate flash music players so much?

1) to bloggers who use those things, music player widgets like that will mess up the loading time of your blog. unless everyone of your target audience have ultra-fast internet (minimum download speed 2MBPS, thats 2000kb per second) they might not be affected. but if they are in malaysia, they'll need close to a minute to fully load your blog. and that kind of load time, in modern internet talk, is slow.

2) like most people who are (almost) addicted to the internet, i have winamp. and i have my own music. and when i blog-walk, i like to listen to my music. so when a blog have autoplay music on it.. it messes everything up. another reason to quickly close that blog with music. and imagine if they're blog-walking from the office.

and 3) i have a 5GB data cap on my internet account (befause internet is considered expensive here in australia). and being a good blogger, i blog-walk daily (well, i try to). those music will force me to quickly close every blog with music players on them. and doing that to them every time kinda makes me feel guilty.

and if they have very bad connection, most probably people wont wait to load your page. grats n00b.. you just lost one reader.


i tried to block in the HOSTS file.. it blocks the page (lets say mixpod.com) but wont stop other blogs to load contents off it. so if anyone who knows how to block this thing.. stopping it to load and download music, please.. let me know.

i am desperate >_<

tentang Best Bean Bag Ever

LOL.. maybe not the best. but i think it's awesome :)


saw this image at crunchgear.com and instantly i thought wont it be cool to have that in our tv room? well.. future tv room. my wife and i are planning to move to a new house by the end of this year. we plan to have a white and green themed living room/tv room. with that bear sleeping on green rug would be so cute dont u think?

too bad it costs USD$135 (and thats doesnt include the delivery) :(

view the Etsy page (more pics there).

and more images of the bean bag at gearfuse.com

tentang Nuffnangers' Habits

well im sorry for generalizing but having explored and spent time on the nuffnang Innit page i start to see these few but rather annoying bad habit of nuffnangers. i'm not making any personal attacks.. just rather a general feel of how the people are based on observations on the first 3 days as a nuffnanger.

again, if anyone is offended i apologize, and please let me know and i'll try to rephrase my sentences.

No.1 - the squished avatar image.
okay the blame shouldnt be put entirely on members.. i think nuffnang.com should change how uploaded image is displayed.. like if the image doesn't fit the display area, cropped it instead of stretc/squishing it. still, the members (nuffnangers) should have a sense of uneasiness when they see their face is displayed squashed like that. it kinda makes the person in the picture look distorted, hideous, and sometimes retarded dont u think? and having multiple images like that kinda make the Innit page look crappy.

No.2 - chatbox abuse.
we all know that some things although we can do it, doesnt mean we should. in the chatbox, it is common that people put links to their article there and i do think it is acceptable. but many have crossed the line of promoting their blog to spamming the chatbox. but since it is kinda common practice, other people just dont give a damn.

No.3 - shit titles.
misleading, outrageous, rude and down right shallow titles to be exact. this is actually a kind of abuse too. people now like to be a jackass and thinking it is fun. a lot of the time i would find it funny too.. but maybe we should know where we can and cant be those things.. especially if it affects someone else. example: titles like "Caught Having Intercourse In Garden - pics!!!" will definitely attract readers. but at the same time it will make nuffnang.com look bad. other people might think.. oh nuffnang Innit is filled with perverts and wankers like that.. and nuffnang probably doesn't care.. lets join them!

No.4 - dang!
the reason why that button is put there is as a form of user-based content control. titles like i mentioned before should be dang!ed obviously. but we arent too fond of punishing random strangers right? especially when we know those titles are just a pathetic effort to attract readers to their blog. but then some people misuse the button just to piss people off by 'dang!' a random unfortunate blogger. that blogger will probably visit this trickster's blog to find out who he is resulting +1 reader for the blogger (works best with bloggers with a lot of fans). sad thing is.. most of the time it works!

now suddenly i have this creepy feeling that people will think im that bitter old man living alone in his house down the street. OMG i need to have more fun in life >_____<. so i'll stop at 4.

tentang Starcraft2 Engine Demo

this video makes me feel like wanna learn to be a game modder. i know there's this one place here in Adelaide but i dont have the money for that >_<. back to the video.. it shows the capability of the starcraft2 engine.. not the graphics side (bacause everyone knows blizz is awesome and they make awesome graphics) but the Custom Map part. using the Map Editor, players can make new maps (obviously), make new units, make a FPS style game, and even make that Raiden style games (that 2D plane shooter). OMG!

5 Reasons Why I Will Not Visit Your Blog Again

my take on this issue.. top 5 list of things not to do on your blog. the view of a guy blogger who tries to visit as many blog a day, as quickly as i can, with least downloads possibble.


#5
Animation Overload
by animations.. i mean moving images (gifs, flash ads, autoplay flash videos, etc). if only there is a button to freeze-frame all the animations. it is annoying when u're trying to have a light read but all this things are moving on the page. worse.. some blogs took the time to make sure ALL images on the blog is animated. even their signature have twinkling stars!!!


#4
Great Wall of Texts
i'm no book worm.. and when i read, i'll probably read word by word. i dont like missing some parts and assume what happens on those parts that i skip. so wall of texts will take too much of my time and i kinda find it inefficient to spend too much time reading something thats unimportant to me.


#3
Ads Takeover
everytime i visit a blog with too much ads, i'll wonder what the blogger really is trying to do. if the answer is blogging.. then make it look like a blog and not like the classifieds page of a newspaper. if u wanna sell stuf.. go be a salesperson. i believe good blogs have a good balance of ads and content.

note: exception for those blogs that sell stuff.


#2
Autoplay Annoyance
mainly.. music. but sometimes videos autoplay too. i know i can pause it.. but it will still buffer/load. it is such a big offence to me that the moment i realize theres other audio playing on my computer, i'll instantly click that 'X' button. if i remember which blog it was.. i'll remember not to visit it again. if i dont, that means that that blog was uninteresting AND annoying. grats!


#1
Massive Image Uploaders
worst offender.. even for a photography blog. please resize the pic.. by doing that, the filesize is decreased making the blog's loading time faster. uploading a huge pic only allows cheap, bad intentioned people to copy the images, print it out and make money out of it without u knowing it.


some things that people normally view as 'bad ethics' in blogging that doesn't bother me much include :
- camwhoring (i find it entertaining :P)
- dark (or loud) background colours/images
- last update is 12 months ago
- boring blog titles
- grainy/blurry image posts

tentang cyber attack on Twitter

blog hopping yesterday was pretty annoying. some sites wont load properly and some wont load at all. i had a feeling it had something to do with twitter. and as it turns out.. it did.. sort of.

then the news came out today. Twitter.com went offline for hours and Facebook, LiveJournal and Youtube and probably more servers out there were disrupted because of a massive, coordinated cyber attack.

what i heard (from multiple sites and blogs) is that the Russians were behind it. i think that is one example of generalization.. because of the source came from Russia so we accuse all of them? pfft! we need to put more thought in our writing people.

these are only what i read on the net. and as we all know.. not everything on the internet is true.

neway im glad twitter is back online now. im dont tweet so much.. im just not that kind of guy i guess. broadcasting my every move is almost the exact opposite of what i'd do. twitter for me so far is for getting weather forecast and news bits from malaysia and south australia without having to view their sites.

read more of the news here (AdelaideNow)

tentang paperkraft.net

this is one pretty cool site. paperkraft.net (paperkraft.blogspot.com) is a site full of free papercrafts (wiki link here) of cool stuffs. they have final fantasy characters (even bahamut!), super mario, zelda, and my favourite so far.. howl's moving castle papercraft.

check out the pics..

(images from papercraft.net)
more pics here (Flickr)

i am blown away by the details in that thing.. print it out and you can make one yourself. pretty cool eh?

blog layout adjustments

i had to make some adjustments to the blog's layout today because advertlets has gone gila!

what's been happening since abt a couple of days ago is that when i load up my blog.. it loads half way because ads are unable to load. tried to load friends' blog (who have advertlets) and same problem happens. same as bloggerunited.com which only loads the navigation and banner. well if i wait for 10-15 mins the page will eventually load but without the advertlet ads. (all approximation made while im pissed off.. subject to a little exaggeration)

i am not sure if i am the only person having this problem (because i dont live in asia) or their server actually did stuff up about a couple of days ago. there is no news on the net.. no notes on twitter abt any technical problems.. advertlets.com, u're a big name so please don't act like u're still some n00b company facing technical problems and hope people dont notice it.

so now i had to move the ads to the bottom of my blog so that other stuff that IS working properly will load.

pfftt!





EDIT:- abt 5 mins after this post is made the ads are fine again and advertlets.com is back online. whoa they work fast to fix that didnt they :P. owh now i have to move the ads back >_>

MORE EDIT:- and now.. advertlets.com and their ads are gone again!!! and i just moved the ads back >_<

tentang lifesize Tokyo Gundam

whoa.. this thing is huge. and awesome. well.. maybe a little geekish but still.. lifesize Gundam is really cool






well.. more pics here