Not too sure what happened, but I got a freaking headache that don’t seem to go away. It started yesterday and it is still on and off today. I guess it could be due to the stress I am having this few days. And I am not sleeping very well. Yes, the weather is good for sleeping as it has been raining heavily these few days but still shit happens. Perhaps I have been thinking too much.Or perhaps it could just be the weird weather? You know, one moment it could be raining heavily and the other it would be extremely sunny? A lot of my friends got sick from this. Looks like our constant abuse of the weather is coming back to haunt us in the end eh? I would encourage everyone to start doing their part for the environment by first not using too much plastic bags. Bring your own bag when  you go shopping for groceries as this will reduce waste. Or if unavoidable then use back the plastic bag for other purposes.

What is surprising is that the headache goes on and off. Sometimes when I am doing something, the headache will suddenly come on and it is a splitting headache. Not your normal kind of headache where you feel a little pain here and there but a rather sharp pain in one part of the brain/head. However, it doesn’t seem to stay in one place. Lol, it goes all over my head like a ping pong ball in motion. Don’t you just love it when you got such a headache? Feels like someone is constantly pounding your head without any clear direction.

So I am very sorry if I had to cut this blog post short. It is very difficult for me to write long blog posts without fainting or just collapsing from sheer pain in the head. Yes, I am exaggerating but I am sure that most of you will understand the feeling.

Yes, how time flies right? I remember just a while back I was thinking of ways to celebrate the Chinese New Year (which was in February or so) and suddenly, it is September already. Another 3 more months and it is the end of the year. I often wonder how is it that we continue our everyday lives without realizing that times really flies. And how many of us realize that soon, we will be old(er) and will have tons of regrets? Have you wanted to do something when you were young but till now, you still didn’t do it yet? What have you accomplished throughout the years? And the most important of all, what the hell have you done?

For me, it’s simple. Nothing much. I am by naturally lazy and if I am not pushed, I will not do anything. In fact, if I wasn’t so crazy about beer and wine, I would not even have purchased the home brewing kit either. Perhaps I love alcohol too much eh? And for my sites, I wanted them to be visited by thousands and thousands of visitors everyday by writing useful and very much sought after articles and editorials. But till now, I have not written a really good or even remotely interesting article. And in my private life, I have yet accomplished nothing significant. It’s the same old boring go home after work kind of schedule that no one really envies. And worst of all, most of the time, I stay home on the Saturdays and Sundays. No, I don’t cry myself to sleep every night. I am not that kind of person who gets so emotional and think of suicide and suffer from depression and shit. Yes, just plain laziness and simply “bochaps”. If only I was a little more hardworking, a little more inspired and a little more disciplined, I am pretty sure that I would have done much better in life. Well, it seems I was dealt with a poor hand and I accept that.

And yes, another year is about to go by. I have this feeling that I am going nowhere fast. Not even my career is going anyway. I am still stuck in the same old job, the same old place and earning the same old salary.

Ahhh…yes, looks like it is the rainy season again. Not sure what really happened to the weather these days but it seems to always go to the extreme. If you are living in Singapore, I am sure that you will know a few months back, it was just so damn freaking warm. Even after coming out of the bath, I would start sweating like a pig. No, I am not exaggerating. It was that warm. The cruel sun never seems to stop shining the blazing heat onto us. The only escape was to the air-conditioned malls.

Now, it is the exact opposite. Everyday I wake up till I go to bed, the weather is either raining heavily or there is some cloudy thunderstorm nearby. And if you think of not bringing the umbrella along, you will be drenced from top to bottom. Of course if you are driving and the destination has sheltered walkways, then you are probably safe. But if not, it would be more prudent to bring either an umbrella or a raincoat. Anyways, nobody uses raincoats anymore. It looks ugly. So, you are left with umbrellas. And best of all, some of those umbrellas are a fashion statement, so I am guessing the females are very keen to bring out their umbrellas to show off. Still, I would prefer the rain than hot weather. When it starts raining in Singapore, the temperature will go down, making it rather comfortable to work and to sleep.

The thing about the rain in Singapore is that it will often rain very heavily. And even with an umbrella, the bottom of your trousers or pants will still get drenched.  Imagine going to work in the morning and getting your shoes and pants wet from rain. You will spend the next 10 hours in misery, hoping and hoping that the clock will reach 6 and you can knock off and get out of those wet clothes. I have faced this time and again, so I will put a pair of extra socks and shoes in the office. Smart right? Of course you can always use a plastic bag to cover your shoes. But…

And I am not kidding you. Just take a look at this article and check them out for yourself. I have seen quite a number of brush sets for Photoshop and the ones that are listed in the article beats them all hands down. Best of all, these are freely available. I am guessing perhaps it is time for me to change the logo of this blog with one of these brushes. Not many people know that you don’t need to have much skill in Illustrator or Freehand to design a logo. In fact, pre-built brushes in Photoshop can be easily used to create a pretty unique design which looks completely different from the brush set itself. And now, with these very beautiful brush sectors, I think this blog will look better. Just imagine the CSS background with one of the images made from the flower vectors and how good it would look. That is if I can get my fat ass off the chair and start my Photoshop…..

Lets all be glad that there are talented people out there very willing to share their skills in graphic design so that untalented people like me don’t have to waste our time trying to figure out how to use some freaking difficult imagine vector program. Let’s keep our fingers cross that there will be even more brush sets or vector graphics available for slackers with a blog/website.

Read here: 16 Interesting Facts About Google.

As you guys know, I am normally not a Google fan. Sure, they do run the best Search Engine out there. But that’s because the rest of the Search Engines are just plain crap. Yes, I admit that it is not easy to create a perfect Search Engine, but it just seems to me that Google is not concentrating on their Search Engine anymore. That’s the result of lack of competition. We don’t see any major improvement in their Search Engine results and listings for about a few years already. It’s been stagnant like a whale stranded on the beach. Okay, okay, sure we do see Orkut, Blogger and Youtube and other nonsense. Yes, they do have a lot of visitors from these sites and yes, they are modern social sites with quite a following. But how will that affect the Search Engine industry? In my opinion, it won’t. I feel that these social sites are unrelated to Search Engine although we do see them often bundled together.

Anyways, before I go off topic yet again, I am here to talk about some interesting facts about Google. I guess you have read the article I have linked to at the top of the post. The most interesting is number 12. It seems that they do read emails! For a company which probably get thousands of emails everyday (most of them would be spam I gather), it’s great to hear that they do read emails. At the very least, I know that it has gone through one real human’s eyes if I send emails to them. That would actually be good news for spammers!

I am also shocked to hear that the “I’m feeling lucky” button is seldom used. It is true that I don’t use it either but don’t their users feel adventurous enough when accessing Google to use that button? Or do they not have confident on Google to provide them with the best Search result? They should remove the button name “I’m feeling lucky” to something more mundane like “Go to the first result”. I am sure that more people will click on that instead of the “I’m feeling lucky” button. It’s human nature.

And oh, it seems that the founders of Google don’t know HTML. Now, that’s really very shocking. Even I know basic HTML.

Looks like the Antivirus company Trend Micro is trying to be funny with their lawsuit against Barracuda. For those who don’t know who Trend Micro is, it is a company whose main business focus is on Internet content security. Sadly, it just means that they are providers of (software) protection against viruses, spywares and malwares.  Yes, you might not have heard of them. That’s because they aren’t really a major player in the market. And yet, they are suing people like they are one big mean powerful corporation which I am sure a lot of us hate.

It  looks like they are suing Barracuda because they claim that Barracuda is violating their patent by distributing the free and open source antivirus program ClamAV, which in my opinion is stupid. How does it violate their patent if someone else is distributing some other software and that particular software (ClamAV) is meant for gateway and email antivirus scanning in the first place. It looks like they are targetting ClamAV users because they felt that this is a threat to their business. I don’t have any problems with people charging others for some service rendered. If you made an antivirus software and you want to charge someone for it, then by all means, go ahead. However, if someone else comes along and say that they have an antivirus software which is free and you don’t need to pay a cent for it, then if it is done fair and square, I too don’t have any problems with that. So how do you deal with it? You can either create a product which will encourage users to BUY your product or you can sue. Apparently, it seems that Trend Micro is using the (ridiculous) easy way out.

The reason why Barracuda (itself quite a player in the market) doesn’t want to settle (which would be much easier) is because if they settle, they are actually causing problems for other users of open source software. Which makes sense because if one side admits wrong doing if they are distrubuting or using a particular open source software, then everyone else using the same software would be implicated.

Anyway, it looks like Barracuda is fighting back with their own countersuit. I am not too sure about all these law terms and jargons and what not, but  it seems that Barracuda has their own set of software patents obtained from IBM. Let’s hope for the best.

For more information on the lawsuit, please take a look here.

Who here disagree with me? Well if you do, then you must be either your own boss or some very high ranking big shot in some very big company doing absolutely nothing at all. Or you could be just some high ranking elite Singapore government official. Anyways, my point is that for most of us, working can be a real drag. I am normally quite a very enthusiastic person in regards to working, but even I get down sometime. And yes, work sucks! Don’t you just hate it when everything in the office just fails and you end up tired, miserable and angry at the world? I don’t want to be that kind of person.

I guess the main cause of why people hate going to work is the work environment. Your boss could be one crazy person whose sole purpose in life is to make everyone (especially you) miserable. Or your co-workers could be those scheming kind who spends most of their time trying to rat you out and playing politics instead of working? Sometimes it is just amazing to see that there are people out there who don’t work for a living, yet get paid to do absolutely nothing but make life miserable for everyone else. Well, welcome to the real world. I know for a fact that in every company in the world, there are always politics to deal with. And sometimes, smaller companies are worse. You would expect big companies where they are many opposite sides with nearly equal power battling it out for control, in small companies, we usually see two major groups fighting it out. And those are in your face kind of politics. Definitely not your average behind the back stabbing which you would expect.

I always find that companies whose boss fails to control the amount of politicking among their staff are usually the ones in deep financial trouble. Of course, this is not definite but a good number of them will be or should be in trouble as politicking fails to achieve anything. In fact, if the staff spend most of their time fighting, what can be done to solve or tackle the company’s problems? Nothing. If they want to play politics, then it should be their downfall.

Dang, my newly purchased mobile phone keeps on hanging. I can’t really pinpoint exactly where and how it happens. It seems to hang randomly but most of the time, when I try to enter to the menu page. Yes, I have recently just upgraded the firmware (it just came out officially) for the E51 Nokia phone but it still hangs. But after upgrading the firmware, it seems to happen less frequently though. Well, better than nothing right?

The thing I hate most about these new phones is that althought they have tons of features, they are usually not stable. In the past, my mobile phones never once hang for over 2 years of use. They were basic phones. My first phone can’t even recieve MMS. I guess when you start adding features into the phone, the coding becomes complicated and there will certainly be more bugs in the coding. However, I think that they should always iron out the bugs and problems of their products before it is being sold to the public. Upgrading their mobile phone’s firmware can be tedious to some. But perhaps due to the competitive nature of the mobile market, we are seeing products being launched even before it is actually ready for use by the public. And worse of all, a lot of such companies refuse to even solve the problems in their mobile phone’s software.

Take a look at this article.

Isn’t that cool? Now why didn’t I think of that? Won’t it be something if one day we could have a bacteria that eats waste products and then excrete crude oil! We could possible solve the world’s problems! I mean wars have been fought for the control of crude oil and we all know the importance of that black oil. Well, if you don’t, you actually use it everyday. Not exactly it, but a refined version of crude oil which you can use to power the PC you are running now, or that car you are going to drive later. Yes, that’s from Crude Oil. You process it so that it becomes petrol for your car.

And the best of all, they are started on it. They have a bug which can eat up wood chips or wheat straw and these bugs later excrete crude oil.  I guess this is what they call “renewable petroleum”? The process is exactly like what you do when you brew beer. You need a yeast strain which can convert food (carbon) to petroleum.Basically, you leave the yeast eat the food and it turn it converts the food to petroleum. When you brew beer, the yeats turns the sugars to alcohol. Petrolem is “very much” like alcohol, so I guess what they did was the engineer or modify the yeast till it can accomplish that. Well, that means that soon we will be seeing home brewed Crude Oil. Don’t need to get crude oil from the local sheik, just brew them yourselves with the leftover woodchips or wheat straw. But what can we do with Crude oil which is not refined?

I hope that one day, they won’t modify the yeast till it eats human flesh and excrete crude oil. It could be very devastating to the human race on the whole. However,if they somehow managed to modify the yeast till it eats stupid or brainless humans and excrete crude oil, then I think it is a very good accomplishment.

It may seem to you that I have been spending a lot of my time on this blog complaining about the weather in Singapore. Well, yes I have. The problem is that it is back again - the extremely warm weather in Singapore! And worse of all, it never seems to end. We got some very warm weather just about 2 months ago and now it has come back. Sure, Singapore is a tropical country and it is warm the year throughout. I don’t mind warm, but the weather is terribly hot. After I get out of the shower, I immediately start to sweat like a pig. And if I don’t switch on the air-conditioner, my room feels like an oven and I can’t do any work. Seriously, the weather is starting to get much warmer every year. I am sure I didn’t feel it as warm last year or the year before. Looks like global warming is truly going to get all of us into trouble.

If you go outside, you can certainly feel the oppressive heat everywhere in Singapore. The only escape is the shopping malls and of course the swimming pools and other air-conditioned places. I guess that is why Singaporeans are so hooked on shopping and spending money. They have no other choice to escape the heat! Even if you take our supposedly air-conditioned buses, you can feel that the air-conditioner is blowing warm water. Sitting inside the bus in the afternoon is exactly like sitting inside my room, it’s blazingly hot and unbearable. And it’s going to get worse as the months of July and August will be even warmer.