Heard of “Bak Kwa” before? Well, it is sort of a traditional meat jerky coated with honey. Not very sure how traditional it is, because it only occurs in Singapore. Never seen such things in other countries, except maybe in Malaysia. It usually comes in pork or chicken “flavours”. And best of all, it is very tasty. What they do is to barbeque the meat jerky in thin slices and wow, the smell is just great. Smells like barbeque meat, but the honey really brings up the flavour of the jerky. Everytime I pass by some of the shops sellng Bak Kwa, I get so very hungry for it. They look like shiny pieces of beer jerky, but definitely looks more appetizing than regular beer jerky.

However, this is the Chinese New Year season. So the prices of Bak Kwa has doubled in the recent weeks. Just like the prices of turkey during the Christmas Holidays, the prices of Bak Kwa increase as well druing the Chinese New Year period. It’s a fact of life. Demand increases, prices will rise. Worst of all, you see so many advertisements for Bak Kwa and they are so damn tempting but since I am paid very low, I can’t really afford them. The prices range from store to store, but it is approximately S$50 per kilo. Yes, it’s that expensive now. Probably that will go on till the Chinese New Year holidays are over. Then the prices will drop. I guess this is the time that they can make money. I bet they make a lot of money from just selling Bak Kwa alone. I seen my boss buying stacks and stacks of boxes of Bak Kwa to give to their important clients and the sales staff. Note that it’s to their clients and their SALES staff, not their poorly paid staff. This is a indication of our standing in the company, I guess. Viva Singapore! Viva Singapore!

So if you going to buy some Bak Kwa, please send me a few. Just a few pieces will do. I am not that greedy to demand a few boxes of Bak Kwa. And why are there so many stores selling Bak Kwa near my workplace! It’s just isn’t fair. You can see but you can’t eat.

If you would like to make your own Bak Kwa, check out this blog: http://www.noodlesandrice.com/bak-kua-bak-kwa-diy-pork-bbq-pork-jerky/

What’s that?!!! Some new religion formed by people who loves text? Or some cult you see so very often sprouting on the Internet? Or someone sent by god to clean up our mess. Na, I will never introduce to you crap now, would I? Textism is just a little website designed for anyone using Microsoft Word as their primary HTML editor/webpage creator. What it does is to help you clean up Word’s HTML page. If you had done your webpage (in HTML format) using Word, then you will realize that Word somehow adds a lot of unnecessary tags in your HTML file. This makes it very difficult for you to troubleshoot any coding problems which may occur. And worst, it makes your file size bigger, hence you are wasting expensive bandwidth to serve your files. You will be surprised to see that all these useless tags can take up more than half the file size! It’s just amazing that Microsoft simple loves to add crap into their files instead of optimizing it. A few years back when I was still using Word to create my webpages, I opened the files with my text editor and got a shock of my life. It was so messy that I gave up on manually editing it!

This is where Textism’s Word HTML Cleaner comes in handy. What this website does is to clean up any word HTML file. It gets rid of most of the stupid Microsoft tags in your file and this will help reduce your file size. However, not all the Word’s propriety tags are supported which means that some of the tags will not be touched while others may be affected by the stripping.

And all these are pretty easy. All YOU have to do is to upload the Word HTML file and the software will do it’s work and return back to you a streamlined and clean HTML file. That’s it. You won’t need to open up your HTML file and start manually removing any redundant tags yourself. It’s done automatically! Or I could suggest you another method. Use a proper text editor to do your HTML coding. Those WYSIWYG software are meant for the beginners and after a while, you will find them useless. And for god’s sake, why use Microsoft Word?

For all you people living in Singapore, I am pretty sure you guys know something about EZ Link cards, right? Come one, even if you don’t take the bus or MRT, you guys should know that it does exist. It’s usually used to pay for our bus fares and MRT fares. And the thing is that it is contactless. Like those access cards you see people use when entering buildings and stuff. All you have to do is to place your wallet (with your EZ Link card) on the terminal and you can pay for your bus fares. You don’t even have to take our the EZ Link card out to “tap” at the terminal. It’s very convenient and I like it. I normally just take out my wallet and tap when I take the bus or MRT. Now, how about Cashcards? Yes, they are used by car owners to pay for the ERP gantry fees you see popping up on the roads everywhere. Oh, it is used to pay for everything else as well. We are talking about a cashless society nowadays. Everywhere you go, it is either card or bust.

Anyway, what is happening now is that Nets (which controls the cashcard monopoly in Singapore) has introduced the Combi Cashcard. What this means is that it is both a contact and contactless card. You can use the old type which slots into a card reader or use a “contactless” terminal. Oh, sure it is good that we don’t have to slot our cashcards into the reader anymore, plus the contactless ones are much more reliable than the contact ones. However, the problem is that the Combi Cashcard interferes with your EZ Link card. So if you have both the EZ Link card and the Combi Cashcard in close proximity, then it won’t work. When you “tap” the terminal with your wallet, nothing happens. I had thought that my EZ Link card was faulty and very nearly bought another one. One of my friends told me that it could be due to the Combi Cashcard that is causing all the problem. You need to take away the Combi Cashcard for the EZ Link card to work. I tried it and yes, it works after that.

Well, this is the example of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Both the companies who owned EZ Link and the Combi Cashcards are government owned. They are controlled by the government and everything they do has to be approved by their boss, who is the government. Yet, we see that the cards (which are very necessary for Singaporeans) are interfering with each other, thereby rendering both useless. This is what I would call incompetent, but I won’t say it out loud. And I won’t keep both the cards together either.

This little tutorial is for the beginner home beer brewer mainly catered for those living in tropical climates like Singapore or Malaysia. If you are already an experienced brewer, then the information found inside this book is not for you. You will fall asleep reading this tutorial. Go get some of those professional beer brewing books which teaches you how to cultivate yeast and shit.

I am a beginner myself. I don’t have the kind of experience those master brewers have, but what I have learned as a home brewer is all in here. If you don’t need complicated instructions and all you want to get is home brewed beer without all the bells and whistles, then this tutorial can really come in handy. It is meant to be easy to follow but comes without too much specifics when we are talking about beer recipes. And no, there are no all-grain brewing steps in this tutorial. They are just too advanced and I think a lot of experienced brewers don’t do that too often either.

This book is meant to be read from top to bottom. Not from the bottom or middle to the top. You may miss some important information if you read it that way.

Basically, brewing beer comes with several steps or phrases. They are cleaning (a very important step), making the wort, fermentation and then bottling. After which comes the conditioning of the beer, which means waiting. Of course, the last part is the drinking and singing or for some, crashing of cars.

What you need is malt, yeast and water. Yeast turns malt to alcohol and thus nearly beer. But if the beer is too sweet, then we will call it mead. To add bitterness and aroma to the “beer”, we need to add hops. Of course later, you need to add carbonation to your beer so it fizzles. Everyone likes a little fizzle here and there once in a while.

Yes, it is actually a “simple” process. If you read a lot of home brewing books, you will discover that these books are really thick and contain a lot of mind boggling information. While all these are very useful, they are not necessary for the beginner. In fact, they can be confusing and put off the beginner brewer. I think it is best to start simple and advance as you go along.

My purpose of writing this book is to make the process of making beer as simple and easy as possible. This way, once you get the basics of home brewing, you will find that brewing beer can actually be very enjoyable and rewarding. And after that, you can advance onwards to more complicated home brewing procedures.

I guess the main reason why we brew our own beer is because it is enjoyable and we get to taste the fruits of our own labour. We also get to experiment with different flavours and styles. Plus it is cheaper than what we get commercially. In Singapore, the tax on alcohol is pretty high. Don’t expect to pay S$1 for a can of the cheapest beer. You can only find that in other countries.

Taste?
Well, it should taste the same or even better than commercial ones if you do it well. Even just following the beer kit instruction, you should have a decent beer to drink in the end.

The problem with commercial beers is that they have been pasteurized and filtered to death. Not that it is bad or anything, but beer like wine gets better with age, so if you can keep your beer for 6 months or so, that beer will definitely taste much better than some commercial ones. The most important is the quality of your ingredients. Higher quality ingredients, you will get better quality beers. Of course, the process itself is important. You need to be clean, very clean to get a good tasting beer.

And you need to experiment with different type of malts, yeast, sugars, hops among other things to get different flavours/types of beer. It is important to note that even if you don’t like a certain type of beer, doesn’t mean others don’t like it. Depending on the different types of people, you could come up with a recipe with all your friends enjoy, eh……. except you. Ironic, isn’t it?

Legal?
In Singapore, you need a license for everything. And that includes brewing beer. Don’t worry, it’s just S$10 for the paper license. You can apply online but the main problem is that you need to collect and pay in person. I guess it is a small price to pay for home brew eh?

http://appm4.internet.gov.sg/scripts/customs/HmBrewLic/HBL1_Form.asp

Do note that in Singapore, you can have only 1 home brew kit (that is really your 30 litre fermenter) but unlike other countries, you can brew as many times as you want. Just that it is restricted to that one fermenter per brew. You cannot have more than one 30 litre fermenter. Although the fermenter is 30 lites, you can brew about 23 litres per batch in the fermenter. Some of the space is needed for the air, foam and others. But if you brew every week, you can have more than 96 (23×4) litres per month. Sounds weird, but it makes sense. The hardworking brewer can make a hell lot of beer. Oh, it’s for personal consumption only, not for sale. You can of course share with your friends. That’s what drinking beer is all about, isn’t it?

I am not sure how it works in Malaysia or Indonesia. Please check with the local authorities and see whether they allow you to do home brewed beer. From what I know, parts of Indonesia, people have been brewing their own traditional alcohol for centuries.

Responsibility!
It is as simple as being responsible for your actions. Drinking and driving is stupid and you will bound to get into accidents. Even if you had tried it before and you arrived home safely, I can assure you, you are just testing your luck here. Don’t blame anyone else for this. If you drink, don’t drive. If you drive, don’t drink.  No “buts” or whatever. Ask your sober friend to drive you home. Or just take the Night Rider Service. You can even pee on the bus or the MRT free of charge. Home Brewing actually solves one part of the problem. If you drink at home with your home brewed beer, you don’t have any excuse to drive at all.

These are the 2 main beer kit suppliers in Singapore. Take a look at their website for more information. Both iBrew and Homebrew will do freight to Malaysia and Indonesia. You will of course need to pay for the charges. I doubt you will find any local source of homebrew in Malaysia and Indonesia.

iBrew Singapore

Homebrew Singapore

Stay tuned for Part 2!

It’s introduction time! This time, I will focus my attention to yet another site instead. This doesn’t require any software or downloads or installation. And what does this website do? It’s a website tool and it does all sort of conversions for you. That’s why it calls itself a free online file conversion site. It supposed supports a huge number of file formats, divided into different categories - documents, image, music, video and compressed formats. Examples of the format it supports are csv, pdf, doc, ppt, bm, gif, jpg, aac, mp3, ra, avi, flv, mov, rmvb, vob, cab, zip, rar and so on. You can take a look at all the formats the site supports here and what they can be converted to. It’s just amazing and mind boggling to see what they can do.

And all you have to do is to go to the Zamzar website, choose what type of files you want to convert and then upload the files to their servers. After Zamzar has finished converting the file (up to 100MB) for you, an email with a link will be sent to you. However, remember that the file will be active for only 24 hours and will be removed from their server. You need to re-upload the file to their servers again if you need the converted file. You can convert up to 5 files per session, making things much faster if you plan to do batch conversion. However, I would recommend you to sign up for their paid plans. You will get a storage space to store your converted files and you can easily manage your files through their interface. For just US$7 per month, you get a 5GB storage as well as file size increase to 200MB. Of course, if you pay more, you get additional features.

The weird thing for me is that when I do the conversion, it was pretty fast. But after finishing the conversion, I waited and waited for the email but didn’t receive any. It took more than 15 minutes for the email link to arrive! Hmmm…..weird right? Fast conversion, slow email? Even their download speeds were impressive. Maybe their email server was overloaded? Or perhaps they are trying to “convince” us to buy their plans? It’s still a business overall. Anyway, whatever their reasons, it’s still a good service and I think everyone should support them. They can really save you a lot of time trying to figure out which software will convert which format. I know it took me a long time to search for these softwares to do the work of Zamzar.

You won’t believe this, but apparently there are people out there who thinks that their sites are so important that they send threatening letters to people whose site ranks higher than theirs. Check out this link.

I can help myself but to laugh at such people and their behaviour.  Well, from what I can gather from the email, the authour of the letter claims that he/she is in a niche market and his/her site ranks number 1 for a certain phrase in Google due to good Search Engine Optimization. But apparently, the recipent of the email now ranks better. Funny thing is that the authour claims that the site is useless and has nothing to do with the phrase. Google, oh Google, where are you? And now, he/she is threatening the site owner with a lawsuit if the recipent doesn’t remove the site from Google!

“Can you please remove your site from Google, so that our site may go higher.” and “If you don’t agree to remove your site from Google for this keyword, we may go upto any extent and  may sue you for this.”. Wuhahahaha, yes, seriously, there are a lot of weird people in this world and now they are on the Internet and into niche businesses. Several of my websites rank pretty high for several niche keywords as well, I wonder will I be receiving a lot of such threatening emails soon? But it is always enjoyable to read aout stupid people on the Internet, isn’t it? I can help myself and wonder, what they are thinking when they send such emails? I mean, seriously, who in their right mind believe that they can force such a thing onto others and still get away with it? And how about ethics?

Yes, no love from my beloved Google. I have the Adsense running in my blog for about 8 months now and I hardly get any clicks and money from adsense. It seems that nobody visiting my blog is willing to click on the advertisements. The reason? Well, it could be that there is actually NOBODY viewing my blog, or it could be that the advertisements there aren’t attractive enough. What do you think is the problem here? You think I should start changing the position of my advertisements? Or perhaps I should start changing a providers? The Adsense competitors isn’t exactly what I would call good. In fact, I think adsense is probably the only choice for people who don’t live in the US, like me. If you live in the US, you can try Yahoo’s PPC system. I heard that it is better than Google’s. At least it’s payout is better.

I must admit that my blog isn’t exactly a traffic magnet. I probably get like 50-100 visitors per day. Yes, I know it’s not that much, but still it is a big improvement from when I first started this blog. I got like 30 visitors per week then. My traffic has improved during the recent weeks too, due to several blog posts which attracted some attention. But the sad thing is that there isn’t any clicks on the advertisements. No, I am not asking people to click on the adverts. Of course not. I am just wondering why there isn’t much clicks at all. And the amount paid per click is even more pathetic. I got paid like US$0.05 for one click. The maximum amount I got for a advert click was like US$0.35. Wow, I am so honoured.

Anyways, don’t worry. I won’t be shutting this blog down due to the lack of revenue. I didn’t start this blog to make money and I definitely don’t want to do online business. And the cost of running this blog isn’t really that expensive. I pay about US$10 per month for the webhosting, with plenty of bandwidth to spare. So, please keep on visiting this blog, I have plenty of crap and nonsense to share with you.

http://blog.jeffkee.com/2008/01/21/hell-explained-by-chemistry-student/

One of the best answers to one of the world’s oldest question - whether hell gives off heat or absorbs heat. Didn’t know chemistry students nowadays are so damn creative. I guess time has changed so much since I was in school that I have no idea they give such questions for exams in school. And what was the professor thinking, giving the student an A+ for the test? A scientific question cannot be answered and quantified by some girl named Teresa and shouts of “Oh my god!”.

It also proves that American students are way too free, even during exams. In Singapore, you are never going to have enough time in your exams to think up such a creative answer to such a profound question. It’s like the meaning of life kind of thing. We all will still be struggling with the first question by the end of the exam. Yes, it is so damn tough, well, I guess maybe just for me. I really hate chemistry. Who cares what bonds with what when you heat some stupid element. I mean, seriously.

I think the best person to ask these types of question is me. I am very intuned with the fabric of life and the meaning of life that sometimes I even scare myself. You don’t have to be sitting on a bench something and meditating to be thinking deep thoughts. Basically, I just exist. And once I exist, I become one with the world. And when I become one with the world, I am in. So next time, ask the correct person these types of question. Oh, by the way, enlightenment comes much easier with alcohol. This is a proven fact.

Wow, I am getting more and more impressed with the open source community nowadays. Just look at the number of very powerful and very useful software available in open source. No longer is open source just for geeks, they are now available everywhere and for everyone! Anyways, I would like to introduce to you guys a notepad replacement tool. It’s called Programmer’s Notepad. Not a very imaginative name, but hey, what do you expect from geeks?

Although it is called Programmer’s Notepad(PN), it’s main function is actually for web programmers and designers. The first version catered mainly for html and web programming. However for version 2, it began to support different programming languages and can understand them as well. It makes programming and coding much easier. It can support html editing and even a preview for both Internet Explorer and Mozilla. You don’t even need to launch your browser, PN previews it for you. Furthermore, PN can support large file sizes which a lot of similar software cannot. Other features include automatic indenting, advanced word wrapping, support for Unix and Macintosh file types, bookmarking, powerful search features and much more. However, note that the latest version of Programmer’s Notepad doesn’t have the HEX editor feature yet. You need to use the previous version of PN.

However, I think my favourite is still PSPad Editor. It’s just too convenient to use. And if I am going to switch to use PN, then I will have to relearn all the menus and shortcut. And Programmer’s Notepad doesn’t seem to have a lot of users. Plus, going to it’s forum. it’s quite empty too. Perhaps PN needs more time and more exposure in order to get more users and encourage more people to use PN.

After like 9 months or so, the latest version of PhpLD (PhpLinkDirectory) has been released! Finally, those people at PhpLD are being forced to release some software which they have been promising for such a long time. And it looks like a big one. Mainly the biggest change is on the article submission. If you need the article submission features, this is a upgrade for you. You can take a look at the new features here.

Some of the new features include a submit article function. I guess this is the same as those article directory scripts which allow your users to submit articles to the directory. This used to be an afterthought by the designers of PhpLD. With this version, it’s a whole new ballgame! So now you can allow users not only to submit links, they can also submit articles as well. You can force users to register or submit articles annonymously. Article writers can also have their very own info page. Of course, users can also comment and rate the articles that was submitted. Wow, that’s good! Finally, PhpLD is throwing away it’s amaetur feel and starting to have very good features, especially when article submission is concerned. Another interesting feature is that the script now allows you to add business listings with their locations included. Yes, exactly like those professional business directories. Furthermore, it allows you to add Googlemaps into your detail listings. If only they have this feature when I first started my business directory. There are also some changes and additionals to the administration pages of the directory script.

As you can see, the main upgrade is the article submission portion of PhpLD. If you don’t need these features and I think a lot of us web directory owners don’t need, then I feel that this upgrade is not worth the effort. Remember, when you do an upgrade, it is very likely that you need to modify your template again. Not to mention all those mods you have already done as well.

Here are more links to information on upgrading PhpLD.

1. Templates changes for PhpLD v3.3

2. How to Upgrade

3. Downloads

Just hope that this version will be stable. I remembered when I started using PhpLD, the version I had had some really serious bugs in it. And after 2 years (I didn’t upgrade) I am still suffering from it. But at least it was usable and I had a very good time with it.