Some of you might have heard of Teflon Tape (not the PTFE kind, those are meant for sealing pipes). It’s kind of a very smooth (non-stick) tape which has properties that make it sort of repel each other while on the other side of the tape is an adhesive layer. So it is very difficult for anything to stick on Teflon tape and that includes dirt or dust particles. What does this mean if you stick the tape on your mouse feet? Yes, smooth and silky operation of your mouse. Nowdays, optical mouse do not come a with ball, so the mouse feet (those little pads on the bottom of your mouse) will tend to wear out fast. Or they get stuck with dirt. This makes it every difficult to move your mouse around. And this is very important for a gamer, especially for those “frag” parties youngsters often frequent. They need precision and they need to move their mouse fast. Youngsters nowadays………..Anyway, I have a layer of Teflon Tape on my own mouse too. I just like the feeling and it is pretty maintenance free too (since I don’t play games much).

However, the Teflon tape tends to fade away fast if you move your mouse very often. So you may need to re-apply another layer of Telfon Tape on your mouse once it has faded away. Yes, this is a bit tedious but it shouldn’t take a long time to cut a few pieces of tape and applying it on your mouse feet right? And it is cheaper than getting those expensive mousepads (or mousemats as some will call it) or even those exotic Mouse Feets. A roll of Teflon Tape is about S$10 while a Everglide MouseMat will cost about S$25 to S$55. And that roll of Teflon Tape can last you more than 2 years from my experience.

Oh, a bad thing about using Teflon Tape is that the adhesive edges of the tape when applied to the mouse feet tend to attract dirt and dust to the sides. So you may need to clean it once in a while. However, depending on your mouse surface, you can actually apply the Teflon Tape in such a way that dirt won’t stick to the edges of the Teflon tape. I myself have done it a few times before, with a little luck.

Teflon Tape is a good solution for all your mouse movement problems. You don’t need to be a gamer to appreciate usefulness of the humble Teflon Tape. It makes working on your computer much more enjoyable and less frustrating when you don’t have to fight to control your mouse. You can also ditch your mousepad while you are at it. The Teflon Tape makes your mouse glide even on slightly rough surfaces.

Hey guys, I am back again to introduce to you yet another authority site. This time it is a site for a forum script. The script is called Vanilla. I am sure if you are a forum webmaster, you will know this name. Although I won’t say it is as popular as PhpBB or VBulletin, it is nevertheless pretty famous. Why is it famous? Well, the main reason is it is unique. It is not your regular forum in the way that it displays the messages and threads if the forum, some of which is being copied by other forum scripts. The latest threads will be shown at the top of the main page so you don’t need to browse to a subforum before looking at the latest discussions. The arrangement and the layout of the threads is very intuitive. You can even browse by the regular method of subforums(or by category) if you so wish. They also have a very powerful search function available for those who like to do searching.

The thing about Vanilla is that it comes out of the box lean and very light-weight. Their requirements for installation and setup is low, so most web servers (with PHP support) with MySQL would work. Although it has all the basic functions for the users and the administrator, compared to other scripts, you can say it is very plain. But Vanilla has a lot of “add-ons” available. In fact, it is designed so that developers can easily and quickly create powerful add-ons for the Vanilla system. Oh, if you are worried about the looks, Vanilla sure won’t disappoint. It has the web2.0 kind of feel but there are many other themes and styles out there too. I am actually very impressed with it’s look. So if you are looking for a unique design for your brand new forum, you will be able to find them easily or you can look for developers to help you create one.

Yes, this is a free script. Open source and standards compliant. They have a very active community which I am sure will be willing to help you out if you have any problems with the script. And furthermore, it supports a variety of different languages with add-ons available. You can finally make your truly global internet forum real soon with this forum script.

Oh, the great MJZ Hosting forum is using this script as well.

I am not a fan of Durians. Sure I do eat them once in a while, usually when I go out with my friends or family. But I am not exactly keen on durians. Most of the time, these smelly spiky fruit (supposedly King of Fruits) does not come to me as very tasty at all. Yes, the fruit itself is creamy but it just doesn’t taste right to me. Sometimes it is sweet and others it taste bitter. And the smell. For a lot of people, the smell is gross but to me, it’s just a strong aroma, nothing else. Just that the smell is very strong. Anyway, I have to introduce to you a small outfit selling Durians. They call themselves 717 Trading! Why do they have such a weird name? I don’t know, but I guess in Singapore, we see a lot of such weird names. Or perhaps their previous location is at some 717 street or something.

Anyhow, the reason why I am introducing you this shop is that it sells mainly Durians. I believe that they have good contacts in Malaysia (where the Durians came from) and they get the best pick. Their Durians are perhaps the best in Singapore. Well, they are the best I have ever tasted. One of my friends told me that they constantly provide good quality and tasty Durians so it was not just my luck that day. They also don’t keep their Durians for long. Stocks are driven directly from the source and sold by the next day. Another reason why their Durians should be fresher. There were cases where Durians were unloaded and immediately sold at their shop.

They have tables (along with mineral water and little boxes of tissue) for you to enjoy your Durians if you don’t want to bring them back to stink up your place and piss off your neighbours. You can stink up their little shop instead. And surprisingly, the people serving the Durians are pretty polite. The boss himself is a very friendly guy. He do go around and chat with his customers once in a while. I kind of enjoyed my little meal there. That’s something considering I am not really a fan of Durians. You don’t really see people in Singapore selling such creamy and great tasting Durians in Singapore anymore.

Oh, I nearly forgot about the price. Not cheap, but not expensive either. I think we should take into consideration the quality of the Durians sold and for it’s price, it’s quite fair in my opinion. They don’t cost a hand or a leg. But don’t expect 3 for S$10 though. If you are going on the weekend, be prepared to wait for your Durians. It can be crowded like hell sometimes. And since the shop is outdoors, you should only visit it in the evening if you are planning to eat there, unless you enjoy eating and sweating in the sun. Oh, they do sell other pastries as well like Durian cakes and Durian Puffs.

I seldom get the chance to review hardware, so I will take this opportunity to do one. I recently purchased a Chimei (aka CMV) 22″ LCD Monitor model CMv221D for around S$390. I heard that the same LCD panel is being used by Dell or some other OEM manufacturer, so I decided to gave it a try. I ditch my old LG 17″ LCD Monitor and got myself one big huge 22″ one. And it is a monster! This widescreen monitor takes nearly 70% of the length of my desk! Luckily, it being a slim LCD monitor, I am able to push it all the way behind, leaving me with at least some space to do my work. I think that when you are so used to having a 17″ screen, using a massive 22″ widescreen will take a little used to. I feel a bit weird looking at a screen that it is so big and “wide”.

Okay, I think you listen to enough of my babble. So now we will go on to the actual review itself. My model is a grey/black monitor. The front is grey (or silver) while the stand is black. They have a complete black or grey model too. I used this color because of casing and mouse are of different colors so that it won’t clash. The design of the monitor is very plain. The controls are on the right corner and the edge is rather thick. And the finish is not shiny nor polished, so it doesn’t look like those funky monitors offered by Samsung or LG nowadays. It’s has a simple and minimalistic look which I kind of like. Those looking for elegance should look elsewhere.

The colors for this monitor is good. At least I can see a white display as white unlike others whose white looks kind of darken fluorescent. Backlight seemed okay too. I tried on in a very dark room and I can see the display perfectly. I am not too sure about the contrast, mainly because I don’t know how people can test the contrast. Different gradients look okay to me, but then I am not that fussy about that. When I watch movies, I see no visible ghosting effects which people complain about, especially looking at their 5ms response time. The “tilt” stand they provide is pure crap. You can only tilt like a few degrees only. Pointless in my opinion. And the stand provided isn’t exactly solid either, especially compared to those Dell ones. But I have seen worse stands, those look (or feel) like they will collapse if a little breeze went their way.

The model I received didn’t have any bright or dead pixels. Thank god. I really hate to see such unsightly pixels on a monitor. It is kind of irritating to see a little ugly spot on your monitor, worse if it is in the middle of your screen! Warranty is valid for 3 years and it is onsite! So if your monitors break down for any reason, you can call them down to rectify.I think this monitor is a great bargain for S$390. Other monitors in the same range cost about 400-500 over. Not worth to buy a monitor just for it’s looks I have always said. If you are looking for a great display for work or play but don’t need to impress your friends with it, you should seriously consider this monitor.

I think most of you guys are Webmasters or even Directory Webmasters. I would like to ask you guys whether you have seen the Yahoo bot (Yahoo! Slurp) going crazy over your site? I mean are they crawling and spidering like nobody’s business? For me and my two web directories, for the recent weeks (or months) Yahoo has been crawling and crawling my sites till it consumed quite a significant amount of bandwidth. Yahoo! Slurp consumed more than double the bandwidth used by Googlebot and MSNBot combined. Well, I am not really complaining, I have more than enough bandwidth remaining, I am just wondering why is this so? And I know that if Yahoo is indexing my site, it is a good thing. Maybe Yahoo is going to do a little surge in indexing the Internet? Or has this behaviour been going on all this while and I recently only discovered this when I woke up from my tomb a few months back?

However, even with this intense spidering by Yahoo, my traffic from Yahoo Search Engine has not increased at all. My general web directory hardly gets any traffic from Yahoo. My Singapore Small Business Directory do get a lot of traffic from Yahoo but it has not increased significantly. So is my site really that attractive to Yahoo that it is sending bots my way very often? Or is it due to something else? Or is Yahoo planning to crash the Internet with their bots overloading servers everywhere? It makes sense for someone who plans to crash the Internet to take out the greatest source of information and enlightenment first before proceeding to less important sites like eBay.

For this blog, Yahoo don’t seem to like it very much which is very shocking! Someone or something that don’t like this blog? It’s a crime. I have like only 67 pages indexed by Yahoo. Even my archenemy Dr Google/Evil has about 300 pages indexed. These are content rich pages. Yes, sure, in the beginning the blog has very little real content because I am not used to blogging and my posts had very few words and content. But nowadays most of my blog posts have well over 700 characters. Well, you gain some, you lose some right? That’s life I suppose.

If you are living in Singapore, I am pretty sure you have heard of this joint called Seoul Garden. It’s sort of a “Korean” Barbeque restaurant. Well, it claims to be a Korean Barbeque restaurant but it’s actually a fast food joint that serves buffet style food which you have to cook yourself. Yes, most of the food you have to “burn” it yourself and I find that it is not actually Korean. So what you do is to take raw food like chicken meat or fish meat or whatever and go back to your seating area and fry it with the provided grill. Hence they have the name Barbeque.

The funny thing is that they don’t provide you with oil or grease to oil your grill. So after a while, your grill will get dry and the meats will get stuck on the grill. So you will have to change the entire grill itself. I was wondering why don’t they provide their customers with oil and let them cook their food properly?  Is it so difficult to provide a little bottle of oil on the table?

My biggest complain about Seoul Garden is the food. The food provided is reasonably fresh (I really don’t know whether it is fresh or not since it is all going to be fried) but somehow not tasty at all. Even after you barbeque is, it still doesn’t taste good. Seriously, barbeque food should be tasty but it seems not the case here. Oh, they have different types of meats but the variety isn’t wide enough. After one or two rounds to the “collection” point, you will have seen (and perhaps taken) the entire menu. The desserts are just normal ice-cream or some pretty disgusting looking ice shavings. Sometimes they will have this “promotion” item like satay or fried chicken to entice you. But in actual fact, all they have is like 10 pieces in all and you will have to wait like for an hour to see another 10 pieces being placed at the collection point. Immediately someone will take the 10 pieces and you will have to wait another for an hour and try your luck again. That’s stupid. A restaurant with seatings for 100 over persons and 10 pieces of fried chicken?? Come on!

Another complain I have is that the service is pretty bad. Most of the staff there are either dead or dying, just like those working in Long John Silvers. Or some of them might even be Zombies, who are not afraid of the sun. Only the managers are in one way or another the live ones there. Well, there is like only one manager per restaurant so you know what it is like there. And the place is always so oily. We were there early at 12pm and the place is already sticky and oily. Let’s all say “Yucks”!

I am sure by now you think that their prices are cheap. Well, you will be surprised, they are not. Although they have stated (you know, the posters outside the restaurant) their price to be 15 bucks per person or so, you actually pay 20 over. Service charge, GST and drinks adds to the total. So unless you are going to eat a buffet without any drinks, you will have to fork out more.

Well, this is exactly the same problem a lot of fast food joints in Singapore suffer from. I think that they believe that a fast food joint should only serve crappy food and provide substandard service so they are all aiming to archieve this plateau of excellence. Thanks for making my meals all so enjoyable.

My company have been using DLink DWL-G122 wireless USB adaptors for nearly a year now. And I didn’t have any problems with them. Ph sure, it has some problems at the beginning with random disconnections with our various access points, but that would very likely be having too many wireless devices sharing the same channel. I solved it by changing some of the access points to another wireless channel to reduce saturation. However, I have been using them for Windows XP systems and the drivers worked great.

And now, they have changed most of the systems to Windows Vista. That’s when all my problems occur. When the new PCs came, I went and download the beta drivers for Vista. Those drivers were updated in March and have not been updated since then. Yes, that’s nearly 4 months of being slack and lazy for our beloved DLink. Oh, did I mention the drivers were beta? So after downloading the drivers, I installed it. The installation went fine and the DWL-G122 USB adaptors were correctly identified by Windows and all the drivers seemed probably installed. So now, I tried to connect to my access point. No luck there. It kept on saying that there is a problem with the wireless network. I tried with another adaptor, same problem.

So I went and download the full installer for DLink DWL-G122 adaptors. It comes with a monitoring system and some other software. But alas, that didn’t help either. The same problem occured. I phoned DLink support and was told that they have only beta drivers available as the latest drivers were “still in testing“! Guess they have been testing their drivers for 4 months and maybe they will wait till the Wireless USB Adaptor becomes obsolete before they will release the Vista drivers.

I had not other choice but to try another method - using Windows XP Drivers and see whether they will work for Vista. Risky but luckily it did. The monitoring software is designed for Windows XP and it failed to load up but the drivers itself worked perfectly. Since I had the original CD and this came with the monitoring software, I had to install the software first then uninstall the DLink monitoring software later. But thank god, it worked great. I was wondering what DLink have been doing all these time - creating a driver for Vista that doesn’t work for Vista and having an old Windows XP driver which ironically works for Vista??

What’s sNews? Well, very likely you will not know what this is since it is currently not that popular. But I believe that it will soon change. It is a lean but powerful content management script. You know, sort of like a blog script for example the super well-known Wordpress. It sells itself as a news management system but whatever it claims itself to be, all I know is that it is a very easy to use script. Just like Wordpress, you can configure your blog with their web-based interface. Since the script is all done in one file (plus the database to store the content), everything can be configure easily without the need to figure out which of the thousands of files to edit.

Why is it good? The most important, it is search engine friendly. Unlike Wordpress (which ironically isn’t that SE Friendly) or other blogging system, you can setup your main page of your blog as a little preview which links to your actual blog post. The problem with Wordpress is duplicate content/supplemental pages (the one of the main page and archive page and the actual blog post). You won’t have this problem with sNews as all the actual blog content is on the blog post itself. The script also creates beautiful static looking URLs for the blog post. sNews can also automatically create a sitemap for your site. I believe these features make sNews a good competitor to Wordpress.

They have a number of free templates (or themes/skins) available for their users. And if you are looking for a somewhat more professional template, you can purchase a commercial template as well. Unless you are some kind of genius, nearly everyone needs some sort of help or support at one time or another, their forum is open 24 hours and you can post questions about the scripts and wait for their developers or other users to respond. So if you are looking for a fast loading blog (or news management) script which you can easily modify, then sNews would be a great choice for you to consider.

Yes, he does. You won’t know it if you saw him but the devil actually wears suits. He comes to you looking like a very cultured and friendly guy but he is not. Why? I will tell you why. Because he is the devil. Their purpose in life is to cheat you of all your hard-earned money and leave you penniless (and even homeless) without a second thought. I read from the newspapers about these people who goes to old folk’s homes and try to con them of their money. They are dressed smartly (with their well-ironed shirts) and they are very convincing but beware of these con artists. And since the older generation is probably not as worldly as you guys, you should inform and warn your parents or grandparents about these people.

Oh, another breed of devils are those salesman you see along Orchard Road. You know, those trying to sell you digital cameras or mobile phones by claiming that they have the lowest price available and try to smooth-talk you into believing them. They make a lot of ridiculous claims about the product they are selling, with features that are actually not supported by the product. Well, it’s my opinion you should always do some research first before buying anything, especially electronic gadgets.

How about those devils selling you insurance or some unknown mutual funds thingy that gives you millions of dollars in return? They tell you tons of jargons and use big words to “shock and awe” you and the truth is, it is never as good as it looks. And you should never sign on the dotted line on the spot. Take any documents back and check everything carefully before you commit.   

These devils in suits will never be honest. They are too busy spit-polishing their horns to be honest anyway. Beware beware! It would be best for you to run away screaming when you see someone dressed in a suit and a crooked smile walking towards you.

If you have been following this blog for sometime, you will realize that I had added advertisements (that is Google Adsense) before. But after changing the theme of the blog (from the default them to this one), the adsense module was removed. Well, now I have added the adsense back into the blog. This is in the hopes of me getting millions of dollars from Google. I have heard that Google will be making billions or zillions of dollars in profits again this year, so why not get a little piece of that pie? I am not being greedy or anything, let’s say 5% of Google’s profits? Sounds very fair to me.

Anyway, the advertisements are all not prominent. You will see an advertisement at the bottom of the first post and if you are reading the actual blog post itself, it will be also at the bottom. Hope that it will not be distracting to you. Anyway, I read about this Adsense Deluxe Plugin for Wordpress which will add the adsense block in the blog post itself, but I am afraid that it will be way too distracting. I also tried to match the advertisement to the blog theme so it won’t be that obvious to readers. I don’t want this blog to become like an advertising blog or those stupid MFA (Made For Adsense) blogs you see everyday on the Internet. I detest those sites. They spolit the image of blogs. In fact, they spolit the image of the entire Internet.

Okay, I will be awaiting the dough coming in from Google real soon. And once I have received the cheque from Google, I will go and get myself a castle or a villa in France or Switzerland. If you don’t see me posting anymore, you know where to find me. Wait, don’t bother me. I will be relaxing somewhere in Europe. For the time being, if you have anything to say about the advertisement (like making it pink or cute) or the blog in general, please comment here.