Well, one thing that is definitely true is that spammers will always be around. They even went and spammed my long lost forum which had hardly any visitors except myself. I guess when they spot such a forum in this condition, they think that since no one is maintaining it, it should be a pretty good target for spamming. And they didn’t spam like one topic or post, they did like 20-25 posts in all. I believe that there were about 3 different spammers, but all were “selling” the same thing - SMS Ads and they were from India. Has India became the spam capital of the world already? In the past, it was Eastern Europe where most spammers came from. Perhaps the outsourcing of spam has shifted from Eastern Europe to India now.

I wonder why did they spam forums that were long dead and even if they don’t know it was long dead, a look at the lack of replies in the forums would be an easy indication. My forum didn’t even have any real activity for months. One would think that they were doing it for SEO purposes but when I looked at the post, I realized that that is not the case. The URLs were just URLs, without any anchor text at all. Either the spammer is not aiming for Search Engine rankings or he/she is just a beginner. It is not ideal to spam a long dead forum and hoping that you will get visitors from those links.

I guess there is no way to truly block or to stop spammers from coming in. The only thing I could do is to block open proxy access from the webhost’s control panel (that’s IP deny manager in Cpanel) using the IP addresses. Open Proxies usually have a fixed IP address which can be easily discovered but the problem is that there are a huge number of proxy servers out there on the Internet. For every one you add to your IP list, perhaps another 5 takes it’s place. Other than that, I have used Captcha to prevent automated bot registrations which don’t seem to be effective anymore. In the past, it was quite effective. The number of spammers that registered were far and few between and these were usually “human spammers” and not bots. I guess for those webmasters with a very active forum, they will be hardpressed to find a solution to the spamming problem. The best way would be to have a number of moderators who will help to maintain the individual subforums and clear out spam as and when they appear. One cannot do it alone. I have tried and it fails badly.

Well if you are into brewing with beer kits, you will be glad to know that Homebrew Singapore has brought in several new stocks of Morgan’s Kits. They are the Queenslander and the Chairman’s selection series from Morgan’s. This is certainly good news for brewers like me who depends on kits to make our brew. And with this, we will have a wider selection of beer kits to choose from. Furthermore, if you purchase it now, you will be guaranteed that the stocks are fresh, an important factor when you are brewing beer as fresh malt extract will taste better.

Anyway, if you are interested, the below are the types of new Morgan’s kits available at Homebrew Singapore. You can find more information at their website, including the pricing. It’s always good to visit the websites of our local online homebrew stores and checking out which new stuff has came in.

Chairman’s Selection

1. Chairman’s Selection Corte’s Cerveza
2. Chairman’s Selection Mulloy’s Irish Stout
3. Chairman’s Selection Scharl’s European Lager
4. Chairman’s Selection Bishops English Bitter

Queenslander

1. Queenslander Gold
2. Queenslander Bitter
3. Queenslander Lager

The Chairman’s Selection should be the premium range for Morgan’s. They come with some high quality yeast which I can’t find much information on. And of course, the prices will reflect that. But it’s just a few bucks more than the other series, so I think I will be trying them out soon enough. They really look very tempting. However I am currently looking at Queenslander Gold, which should good very well when drinking with friends. It is supposed to be something of a lower alcohol but is extremely refreshing. Hey, what can I say, session beers are my thing.

I wonder anyone drank before Corte’s Cerveza style beers before? Looks like it is getting more popular with beer drinkers these days. I am definitely not a stout drinker and lagers will be pretty difficult for me to do in our warm climate. It is just too bad that the extremely popular Morgan’s Blue Mountain Lager is still not available at Homebrew. Let’s hope that Homebrew will start bringing in stocks for my favourite beer kit soon. I am pretty sure that there are a lot of other fans of the Blue Mountain Lager out there clamoring for it.

First of all, I would like to say that I am not a food critic. Well, I eat food so I know a little about food. I am also not a big food eater but some people may call me a choosy eater. Yes, I may be a little choosy when it comes to the kinds of food I eat, but overall I think I do eat a decent variety of food. Anways this is just what I experienced with my travels to Hong Kong just a few months back.

The thing about Hong Kong food is that it is bland. Most of the food do lack in spices and herbs. I ate their bbq pork meat noodles and was surprised that it was just bbq meat and noodles without the garnishes you see often in Singapore. But that being said, it taste better than what you can normally find in Singapore. Not too sure but I think the quality of the bbq meat and the sauce makes all the difference here. I am guess the quality of the meat in Singapore is poor compared to what you find in Hong Kong. But isn’t Singapore’s food supposed to be much fresher than in Hong Kong?

The Dim Sum you find in Hong Kong beats what you can find in Singapore hands down. In fact, if you go to the most expensive resturant in Singapore, you won’t find that it taste better. Again, I would say that it is the quality and the freshness of the food there that makes all the difference. And perhaps the chefs there are more skilled and talented? I just wonder why we don’t import such talent into Singapore?

Most of our fresh food comes direct from Malaysia. But when I eat in Malaysia, I find that their standard and the taste of the food in Malaysia much better as well. Not too sure what went wrong but it seems to me that we may be getting the lower quality foodstuffs. Or perhaps it is just physcological? We always think that the grass is greener on the other side I guess.

Anyways, the variety of food in Hong Kong is less than what you can find in Singapore. In fact, throughout my travels around Asia, Singapore has the widest selection of food you will ever find. You want Indian food? You got it and it’s not like you have to travel miles and miles to find it. You want Italian food? You can find it in Hawker centres now! You are craving for Japanese food? Yes, you can find it in Hawker centers as well. But then again, even with the huge variety, you will seldom find great tasting food in Singapore. This is very disappointing to see that the standard of food in Singapore has dropped a lot throughout the years and everything now has been completely commercialized. Now we get mass produced crap on the table. In Hong Kong, you will still be able to find some very delicious foods if you look carefully.

Although the prices of food has risen in Singapore, the price of food in Hong Kong is still more expensive. The main reason is that you won’t find hawker centres in Hong Kong. The closest you will only find are teahouses and food courts. The rest are just restaurants. And as we know the rent in Hong Kong is very high, I don’t expect the prices to be lower than in Singapore. It’s about 2 times of what you would normally pay in Singapore.

Planning to get married soon? Or perhaps it’s your first anniversary and you want something special for your better half? Or you are just thinking of pampering yourself with some very expensive jewellery? Well, I have created  a list of jewellery retailers just for you guys (or girls). It’s not as comprehensive as I would like to it be, but I think it does list down some of the big and small jewellery stores in Singapore. Not to worry, I will soon be adding more to the list. Anyway, I have also created another listing of speciality jewellery stores which caters to a different group of people. I am sure that there are people out there who appreciates something different from the “regular” jewellery.

The thing about women is that they really like shopping for jewellery. I don’t understand how they can spend hours and hours looking at small pieces of metal and find it very exciting. To me, a piece of gold is just a piece of gold. Sure, it looks good but seriously, it is just a piece of gold. Nothing more. If I need to buy jewellery, I would go to the nearest store I can find, choose one and be off in no time.

Singapore Jewellery Stores

Singapore Speciality Jewellery Stores

If you know any stores which sells jewellery and has a website, please submit to my business directory. Isn’t that excatly what the Internet is all about - helping others? I really hope to improve on my Singapore Business Directory and attract more visitors to it. 

I had some free time yesterday and so I decided to look a hard look at myself and what I have done FOR myself. I realize that I really didn’t do much in life. No seriously, I didn’t accomplish much and I don’t have anything to show for. I have just this blog and a few web directories. The worse thing is that they suck big time. I don’t get much visitors at all. This blog gets approximately 30-40 hits per day and most goes to the DNS Host list which I have created. Sure it is a constant stream of visitors but hardly anything to be proud of. Although my web directory do get a decent number of hits (maybe about 150-200 hits per day) but again it is nothing to be shout about since most are just spammers.

When I first started my web directories, I thought that I will soon be rich as thousands of webmasters will flock to my web directory and start submitting their sites. And paying me good money for it. Be alas, it never happened. I was just too naive to think that it would be so simple. Looking back, I am not surprised. I didn’t really do much to improve my web directory. The listings in the web directories are all submitted by webmasters whom are usually all SEOers. The reason why they are submitting to my directory is just to improve their site’s visibility and Search Engine rankings. However, since most of these sites have also been submitted to other web directories, my web directory has became useless as a resource for visitors.

A web directory main purpose is to categorized sites into different categories for easy reference. However, if all the content could be found in other directories, then it is just a replica. And most of the sites which was submitted aren’t exactly high quality stuff. Most high quality sites won’t waste time, effort or money to get listed in web directories, especially a small web directory like mine. If the site is high quality and useful, then the owner of the web directory should have added the listing himself. Well, this I never did. Thus, it never attracted the kind of visitors which I wanted. Most visitors come to submit their sites to the directory. Very few goes and browse through the various categories in the directory.

Well, first of all I was extremely naive to believe it was easy money. Start a web directory, wait till people start submitting and then money will flow in fast. I mean sure others have done it but they did put in a hell lot of effort and time to build up their own web directories. It’s not EASY money. If you were to browse through the Digitalpoint forums, you can see just how hardworking some of these directory owners are.

Anyway, this is a lesson learned. Pretty valuable lesson.

Just came back from Vivocity and it was terrible. The entire place was just overcrowded with people. There wasn’t any parking space and Vivocity was supposed to have one of the largest parking space in Singapore. We had to wait for 30 minutes before we could get a parking space. Yes, it took us 30 minutes of driving round and round the parking lots to find just a single parking space. And the rush for a parking space was crazy. People were just driving recklessly when they spotted a green light. For those who don’t know what that means, it is actually a light indicator which turns green (from red) when a parking space is available in that lot. I think it’s dangerous but I understand the frustration of having to wait so long for a parking space.

The problem is that Singapore is just too overcrowded. The buses are overcrowded. The roads are overcrowded. Even the eating places are overcrowded. In the mornings, if you are lucky, you will be able to find a seat on the bus to work. But nowadays, that chance of finding an empty seat is rare as the number of people in Singapore is raising rapidly. No, the number of Singaporeans remains about the same, but its the number of foreigners coming into Singapore that is increasing rapidly. This has already put a serious strain on our resources and has increased the cost of living in Singapore. I mean if the population increases, the demand of food, living space, transport and other resources will increase as well. Thus the price of everything just keeps on increasing while the salaries of most Singaporeans remain stagnant.

No, first of all, I am not saying that we should not have foreigners in our country. They do in fact help Singapore’s economy greatly. And by taking over jobs which Singaporeans cannot handle or are unskilled to do, they are helping to build our country. Plus we have another group of foreigners who take over jobs which Singaporeans shun like construction and other menial jobs. We do have a need for such foreigners. However, the problem comes when foreigners start to take over jobs which Singaporeans can and have the ability to do. These are of course introduced by our country’s elite who benefits greatly from such foreigner influx into our job market since they are the biggest employers. The simple reason is to suppress overall workers’ salaries. Logic states that if there is a increased demand for workers, salaries of the workers will increase as well. But instead of increasing the salaries, you simply increase the supply by allowing a large number of foreigners into the country’s job market, then these employers are the ones that only ones that benefited from this “open door” policy.

Is it sad to see that our government is not doing anything to stop it. In fact, they are the ones that are cementing these policies since many of these employers are relatives and have relation to our government officials. But they were elected to help the people, not themselves nor their relatives. Again, I have to stress my disappointment at our government, whose own self interest triumphs over Singaporeans’ and they have caused a lot of unnecessary hardships for the common man on the streets.

What’s that, you might ask. Well, it is a device which are acts like someone is watching the TV. You know, when you go home at night and you see about your flats or houses those flashing lights here and there with shadows and movements on the wall? Yes, that’s exactly what it does. It emulates people watching an actual TV but without the TV. It’s main purpose is to scare thieves away. So if you are out of your house, you can switch on the TV or just use this emulator and pretend that there are people in the house watching TV. The idea is that if burglars think that there are people in the house, they will most likely not rob it. They will choose an easier target, like your neighbour’s house which has nobody in it.

The FakeTV is actually a strobe that flashes out beams of light on the walls and will mimic what you see outside from people’s houses when they are watching TV. It produces the effects of “scene changes, fades, swells, flicks, on-screen motion and colour changes”. However, it does not produce any sound effects. So if you are living in a country where houses are so close and the doorway is very near the window, you could have a problem if there are slightly smarter burglars aiming for your house. but not all burglars are smart and most will not risk having people in the house when there are so many other tempting targets out there. And when we are talking about Singapore, the entire house board flats is a very tempting target. The trick is not to be as silent as possible and not to attract any attention since there are a lot of residents living in an housing board flat, thus a lot of witnesses as well.

From what I see, the price isn’t very cheap. It cost about US$49 and the idea of just flashing strobes costing that much is kind of a letdown. I mean it isn’t really an high tech equipment and all it does is produce different types of light. In fact, just switching on the living room light and the radio should be just as effective as using this strobe. Burglars will not dare enter a fully lit house with music in the background. A good idea but just too expensive for practical usage. If you are into such gadgets and you are a bit paranoid, then by all means, go ahead and buy it. Maybe if you are living in an private residential area, you can consider this. But if you are thinking of buying this for real practical purposes, then you should reconsider.

Yup, it seems that time flies by as fast sometimes doesn’t it? And suddenly it is the school holidays. This will be great if I am in school but I am not. I am working and we working adults know that there aren’t exactly holidays when we are working right? Man, I just took one day leave from work the other day and I was bombarded with phone calls every hour. Okay, it wasn’t that bad, but they did call and bother me when I am on leave. Hey, don’t they bother me enough at work already?

Anyway, if you are a parent, this is definitely a good time for you to go on  a vacation with your children. Parents need a holiday as well and what better way to take a break then to go on a holiday with your family members? I mean if you are stressed taking care of your children in Singapore, I am sure you will feel more relaxed when you are taking care of your children in another country which you are not familiar with. And the best part, you get to see stuff which you have never seen before in your life. For the kids, it’s probably the best feeling there is. No need to worry about tuition or some stupid music lesson or drama class which you are never interested in. And you get to stay up late at night to watch TV!

So if you are into holidays and stuff, please take a look at our list of Singapore Tour/Travel Agencies. I can imagine that picking out a good tour agency can also be very stressful for you. Well, in Singapore everything is stressful, that’s why we need to travel out of Singapore to relief that stress, even if it makes us even more stressful in the process. Ironic? Very. But if you don’t get out of the country, you can go insane with all those stress building up inside you.

I often use photo sharing host to well…host my photos. They are a great bandwidth saver for me as my webhost has a limit on the amount of bandwidth I can make use per month. Text usually don’t take up much bandwidth. However, photos and images do. Not to mention videos or audio which could really leech up tons of bandwidth if your site goes viral! Just check out those sites that got “dugg” and how fast they collapse due to the huge surge in bandwidth usage (and server load as well).

Anyway, I have complied a list of photo sharing (and video sharing) websites where you can “share” your images with your friends. Take a look below:

1. http://photobucket.com/ - My favourite. Fast, stable and you can upload multiple files into your account at the same time. Free service.
2. http://www.flickr.com/ - Another very popular photo sharing website. This site really attracts a crowd. Free service.
3. http://www.dropshots.com/ - Themed as a family photo sharing website. Not really, but it works. Free service.
4. http://www.smugmug.com/ - Another good photo sharing website. Seems to attract the same crowd as flickr. Not sure whether that is a good thing or not. Paid service.
5. http://atpic.com/ - Simple photo sharing host. Doesn’t have the flash of the other sites which makes it all more attractive to me. Free service.
6. http://www.myalbum.com/ - Based in Netherlands. Free service.
7. http://picasaweb.google.com/ - Google’s answer to photo sharing. The software works great but this image sharing service I did not try yet. But it’s Google, so…. Oh, free service.
8. http://www.webshots.com/ - Formerly the site that offers some nice screen savers which eats up tons of resources on your PC and cause your PC to crash. They are now offering image and photo sharing as well. Free service.
9. http://www.23hq.com/ - Looks good but I never tried it. Free service.
10. http://www.bubbleshare.com/ - Claims to be the easiest photo sharing and hosting site on the Internet. Well…I don’t know about that one but at least it is free.
11. http://www.ringo.com/ - Looks decent and very web2.0. Actually it looks like one of the many photo sharing sites out there these days. Free service.
12. http://www.fotki.com/ - Tried this one. Very fast photo and image host. Free and paid service.

Well, go ahead and try them out. I don’t understand how these photo sharing sites make money? I am sure that their bandwidth usage is extreme and since a lot of them are free, how do they make money? The advertisements I see on their sites will probably not make them a lot of money and the images hosted on their servers do not display any advertisement captions either.

Well, I have home-brewed about 4 batches of beer already and all of them using either kits or extracts. My first extract brew didn’t turn out so well, mainly because I was a cheapskate and wanted to skim on ingredients. And the truth is, using kits is exactly the same as using extracts since they are basically the same process. The thing I discovered about using kits and extracts is that although it does taste nice (if fact it taste better than a lot of commerically available beers), there is still a lot of room for improvement.

I guess one of the steps is to use grain. No, I am not going to use all-grain as this process requires a big investment in equipment and since I am living in a housing board flat in Singapore, I don’t have the space for a 6-7 gallon stainless steel pot. You can’t really do all-grain without that big mother of a pot. And just imagine the burner needed to boil that 5 gallon of wort. People who do all-grain usually do it outdoors and they use propane burners to boil their wort. So I think the next best thing is to use steeping grains.

Just what is steeping grains? Well, instead of just using dry or liquid malt extract, you get some of the malt or the sugars from the grains itself. So, you need to steep the grains in warm water and this will extract the malt flavours from the grains to your wort. It is sort of like in between all-grain and all-extract. What brewers normally do is to use some base malt to get the freshess and the taste from the grains, then add more malt extract to make up the rest of the bulk of the wort. Yes, it’s not the best solution, but it’s practially and economically as well. It will also improve the quality of the beer. Base malt grains are not expensive and there is only one or two additional steps - steeping the grains and achieving the hot break.

So what steeping grains brewers do is to steep their grains in warm water (at a certain temperature) and after a while, they will take out the steeping grains and add in the rest of the malt extract. However, it is important to note that unlike those malt extracts we buy from the store, you need to create the “hot break” to leech out the proteins and other stuff from the malt that we extracted from the grains. We don’t want these proteins in our beer as they will affect the colour, the taste and the mouth feel of the end product. So you need to do a rolling boil and achieve the hot break. Plus you will need to do a proper “cold break” as well. Cold break here means that you cool down the wort as fast as possible. This will prevent beer haze.

Anyway, I am keen to try out this method. However, my stainless steel pot can only hold 8 litres of liquid. This means that I can only do a 6 litre wort because of the hot break. We don’t want the pot to be too full and then create a big mess in my kitchen. Cleaning up dried wort is very very back breaking work you know. Well, let’s see how it goes. Maybe I will be buying a 12 litre pot to do this.