A quick post on how things change online depending on where you are. We transited at Kuwait International and I quickly wanted to check on a location I had to go to. And whoaa… things changed drastically on screen. Gave me a bit of a surprise for awhile.

Even Facebook was trying to serve me their localized ads. Sorry, I don’t read Arabic, though!

Wow, I end the year with spelling errors on the national postal service website, and I start the year with an “interesting message” for the Kuala Lumpur City Hall left by a certain interesting individual with the handle “manadocoding”. It’s supposedly left for a “malingsia” - or is that supposedly Malaysia? Whatever the case, it’s really embarrassing - and no one has stepped in to fix it yet. It’s been a good 48 hours since.

Our enterprising detectives at my office - Integricity, set off immediately to google the handles, and found the friendster profile for manadocoding. The Alexa traffic rank for their website at present is 575,545 which is a lot better than TheBackpackr (sigh… maybe I should go hack some websites… *grin*)

Upon googling Malingsia, it pulls out quite a lot of definitions, with one from the urban dictionary stating:

Malingsia (Noun) is a sarcastic slang for Malaysians. originally combined from 2 words “Maling” (Javanese, meaning “thief”) and “Malaysia. Malaysia keeps claiming Indonesia’s national cultures as malaysia’s belonging, that’s the etymology of the word Malingsia.

Uh oh, looks like some Malaysians have gotten on the bad side of Indonesians. Sorry!

There’s even a website malingsia.com (which was down, at press time - I always wanted to say that! hahah) which I retrieved from Google’s cache that shows a blog of sorts against Malaysians.

Once again, on behalf of the rude and obnoxious Malaysians, I would like to apologise.

And to our city hall aka Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur, please get someone to fix your website NOW! It’s embarassing!

Happy new year to all, and as my last post for the year, here’s an expose on how our Malaysian postal services sends out greetings to the nation. nuff said!

I hope all the staff at Pos Malaysia had a super Chritsmas celebration? *shudder* No wonder our parcels keep going missing.

* For all my foreign readers, “Pos” is not a misspelling - rather, that’s how it’s spelt in our national language. But Chritsmas is definitely WRONG!

I’ll be speaking at the Asia Business Forum in April next year and was given the choice to speak on “Branding using Twitter” or “Adapting business practices to harness interactive technology and stay ahead of changing markets”.

I chose to go with the latter, especially in light of the impending recession. I felt I would be able to address the audience on how to best utilize technology to overcome reductions in marketing budgets.

I was requested to send in some portrait pictures, and I sure didn’t want to send in passport mugshots, or anything that would remotely associate me with being a jailbird. So here’s a result of my creative wife’s skill.

So, what do you think? Top option or bottom one? Yeah, guys are entitled to be a little egotistical and full of themselves at times!

An inherent problem of Macbook and Macbook Pro power adapters is that the cable tends to fray and after more usage, it will cease to work. Reinforce your cable with this quick DIY fix that will help you extend the life of your power supply.

If you want to know how badly the power adapter can get, check out how it smokes and fries in the 2 videos below. Scary stuff!

Oh, and for those of you who are into video production, this is the first upload of mine that is in HD. Click here and switch to HD mode to see it in all its glory!

I used a Sony SR-7 camera with AVCHD functionality, and edited it on Final Cut Pro 6.0.1. Here’s a warning… it takes a LONG time to render (or maybe it’s my hand-me-down Macbook Pro that doesn’t handle HD footage too well).

Music credit: Alexander Blu

Errr, I was just trying to sign-up for a new Technorati account this evening, and I was presented with a fairly horrifying message.

Brrr… I don’t want to be in their head sysadmin’s shoes right now. I bet he’s literally freezing his butt off in the data center right about now.

At least the error message looks kinda cool - and not a standard “Times New Roman” font. Or is it because they have outages thaaat often that they decided to design it while waiting for the restoration to be complete? *shrug*

[UPDATE]

Hey look, I found another error message - quite funkily crafted too! Looks like they like designing their error messages alright…

I’ve been reading quite a lot about WordPress 2.7 (named Coltrane) and how it is a major upgrade over all the past 2.6 releases. I felt I needed to do the necessary upgrade and keep abreast with things. I do know of some people who have BROKEN their WordPress blog installations after an upgrade, so please, PLEASE do backup both your database and your web files BEFORE you embark on this project.

Then, spend some time reading the official WordPress upgrade guide which is found here.

It took me about 30 minutes to read up about the process, deactivate my existing plugins, backup all the necessary files, download the new latest.tar.gz file, I was off on my SSH spree to decompress and copy over the necessary files, while preserving my original theme and customizations.

I forgot to take a screen capture of The Backpackr backend before upgrading, so I grabbed one off my company’s blog site. This is how it looks before the upgrade - fairly clean, but quite severely lacking in navigation, hence the need to install third party tools to improve admin menus.

And ta daaa, the ALL-NEW-AND-IMPROVED WordPress 2.7 - one of the most major changes is really the user interface. They’ve spent a lot of time noting down the common paths that bloggers take and made them handy, with less clicks to get to. The Dashboard on the left is really nifty too with nice new javascripty sliders. Bravo, Wordpress…. BRAVO!

As I was writing this post, I already noticed they have improved the image upload mechanism. Previously, when you select insert image at full-size, they LIE… they still try to squeeze you into some WordPress-thinks-you-need-500-x-400-size or something. Now I seemingly have power to go full-size and REALLY have wide images without tweaking the HTML behind it.

Other functionality that is advantageous to the blog administrator is the ability to upgrade WordPress with a click and a little typing, rather than having to download and manually upgrade it like how I did. It’ll save you a good 20 minutes, at least. I haven’t tested this feature yet, obviously… as there aren’t any upgrades to be had yet.

Here’s a snippet from the WordPress blog that I thought was interesting.

The Story Behind 2.7

The real reason Coltrane is such a huge leap forward is because the community was so involved with every step of the process. Over 150 people contributed code directly to the release, our highest ever, with many tens of thousands more participating in the polls, surveys, tests, mailing lists, and other feedback mechanisms the WordPress dev team used in putting this release together.

I’ve been commenting on blogs for awhile now and wondered how these people just seem to have their pictures pop-up everywhere. Surely they can’t have uploaded their pictures onto every person’s blog, right? Duh, stupid question!

Anyhow, the answer is really simple - get a GRAVATAR. That stands for GLOBALLY-RECOGNIZED-AVATARS. WOW… what a great idea. So here I am traipsing over to www.gravatar.com (incidentally, they share the same database as Wordpress, and if you have a Wordpress account, you can log right in) to get myself an avatar.

Yup, go choose a suave picture of yourself, and send it to the server. Your email address is now associated with that image, and when you go onto a Wordpress / Blogspot site and leave a comment, your picture will automagically appear if the blog owner enables gravatar support! Amazing, eh?!

For those geeks who want to know how it works, I did a tad bit of reading, and in a nutshell, each blog engine encrypts your email address with something called an MD5 encryption method (the FBI/CIA folks probably created it… hah), and then sends the information in the form of the img src tag to the gravatar servers, which then return the associated image! That’s quite a brilliant idea, and your email address never gets submitted directly to their servers.

Go, get yourself a gravatar today and look cool-er!

I’m not sure how you store your media, but I sure hope to goodness that you backup your data regularly. And when I say backup, it doesn’t just mean burning one DVD copy of your wedding photos.

These days, data is really the lifeblood of most businesses, if not all of them. And we cannot go without it (do I hear a chorus of “yes-es”?). When was the last time you took a break from your blackberry, iPhone, computer and Internet for more than 72 hours? (’nuff said, right?).

For those who are not convinced about backups, read an article I wrote some time ago here.

Anyhow, I archive my data on several brands of DVD, and I’m glad I did do this weird step in data backup as sometimes, certain brands of DVDs do fail. Here’s some photos from DVDs of mine that suffered weird symptoms. As a result of these problems, your computer might just freeze and not be able to access the data, or certain files will be inaccessible. The worst case is a totally inaccessible disc.

I think I’ll refer to this as chicken pox - there are random spots on the DVD.

And this is known as dandruff - it flakes

Suicide - looks like slits were made on the DVD

Well, I hope you’re better acquainted with the various “illnesses” that DVDs develop and do something to doctor them before it’s too late.

For those who don’t know, contextual ads are targeted advertisements that are displayed on a webpage based on what the content is. For instance, you may be looking at a page about the latest cameras and all of a sudden, Google serves you an ad for guess what… the new Canon 5D MKII camera!

Well, it doesn’t always work… I was watching a video on YouTube today that was made by this ultra-cool-yet-crazy-lady called Justine Ezarik, or probably better known as iJustine.com. Anyhow, what happened was, YouTube as always was serving ads, and I suddenly noticed that it had taken the literal word Turkey, and was serving ads to go visit the COUNTRY OF TURKEY!

Check this screenshot out…

Anyhow, I guess it’s not so easy for the ad engines to determine what type of turkey Justine was parading about. It’s just a little unfortunate for advertisers who choose keywords that might have different connotations. As such, when you advertise on Google, do beware of how you position your ad.