If you need an entertaining movie for a very good laugh, Enchanted is perfect for you. I thoroughly enjoyed it, laughing virtually non-stop from start to finish. Highly recommended. 
from me.
So close, yet so far …
Come to this year Christmas Gospel Rally on 16th December 2007. One in Bahasa Indonesia will start at 4pm, while the Mandarin translated to English will start at 7.30pm. Both sermons during the gospel rally will be brought to you by Rev. Dr. Stephen Tong. There are various versions below, feel free to download and share through email, print-out, blog, friendster, myspace, facebook, any way you can get your friends through. There are version below that you can use for MMS too.
Indonesian version poster. Click here for the original A3-size poster. Warning, it’s 2.2 MB in size.
Mandarin/English version poster. Click here to download original version.
To be used with mobile phone sending through MMS.
Click here to download 240×320 version, or 480×640 version.
Few months back, Sony announced their online photo sharing site, Imagestation, will be closed. That came as a big blow to me, as I have backed up all my photos since 1999 with them, over 25,000 photos at over 33 GB. All my photos during my university days and working days until now are all there. All my families photos and all those travels are all there. I have used it as my second backup. I have a full set in my main hard drive, and another set in my external hard disk. If there is anything that I cannot lose from my PC, this is it. I can lose installer files, some documents, it’s fine, but not my family and my photo collections, they are irreplaceable. I’m sure you agree with me on this.
My current “My Pictures” folder size
Warning: Tech talk below, but if you are interested how to backup your ever-increasing photo collections online, read on.
Imagestation announced they’ll move all my photos to another site, Shutterfly, for free. That’s cool, I thought in the first place, until I found out that I couldn’t access my original-sized photos in Shutterfly. I contacted their customer service, and they said that they don’t provide original-sized photos because of technical reason. What??!! When I upload a full 5MP photo into Shutterfly, you tell me 640×480 photo is the only one I’ll ever get? C’mon, be serious. Yeah, they are serious, they don’t provide it. Sad.
And, here I am, looking for a new host for all my photos, and I’m ready to pay for it. I know no free site will host my 30GB photos for free, none. I’ve done some researched over the past one week. PicasaWeb looks good and easy, Flickr is popular though un-organized, but my choice in the end came to either Fotki or Smugmug. Picasa came with free 1GB storage, and it’s $20/year for 10GB or $75/year for 40GB. That’s expensive, and very limited compared to the rest of the competitors. Flickr, on the other hand, offer $24.95/year for the pro account, for unlimited storage, but it’s messy. The only way you can organize your photos is by sets and tags, and that’s messy to me.
Come Fotki and Smugmug, two very well known photo sharing site. Fotki currently offers $30/year for unlimited storage for its Premium account. What drives me to Fotki is its ability to allow FTP access. With FTP access, it’ll be so easy to upload your photos, and to download them in the future should I need it. It allows you to create folders, subfolders, sub-subfolders, and so on, to organize your albums of photos. That’s much better than Flickr’s. 
I can easily organize by year, by month, by events, etc. Next competitor is Smugmug, I am currently on their 14-days free trial of Standard accounts. I still have 10 days left to try out their services. A standard account costs $40, the most expensive of all (not considering PicasaWeb), but its features and potential beats the rest. Firstly, it provides an open API, basically an open programming language, so anyone can write any utilities, applications to interface with Smugmug. The result are impressive, there are a number of free applications out there that allow you to upload, download, and do many things with your Smugmug account. ACDSee, which I use, offers Smugmug plugin with their latest ACDSee 10 Photo Manager. Secondly, it allows better organization like Fotki, albeit only two levels, but that’s enough. You can have keywords as you would expect, but you can create ShareGroups, which can turn out to be useful.
For example, the way I categorize my albums is by years and months. Subsequently, I can create ShareGroups that is called “Church“, and pick all the photo galleries across those years and months that has church outings and activities, and I can share that link with my church friends. That way, they’ll see only photos that matter to them, not every single activities of my life in 2007, for example. If there isn’t any major issue I find with Smugmug, I’ll likely sign up for their service before my trial expires.
Anyway, if you happen to like to sign up for a Smugmug account yourself, you can use my referral code and enter it, when you sign up, into Smugmug voucher coupon code: C26cqbAfqMjWs. I’ll earn $10 for my next year’s subscription, and you’ll earn $5 yourself, paying $35 instead of $40. Definitely not much, but it’s a win-win really. Do you use any online photo sharing/backup site? Where do you keep them?
If you have used or are using Windows Vista, you will likely to bump into these two creatures in Windows Vista, Windows Modules Installer that appear as TrustedInstaller.exe in Task Manager, and Windows Search that appear as SearchIndexer.exe. They work great, really, in the background. The former is used by Windows Update, and silently in the background installs and keeps your computer safe and secure and updated. That’s good. The latter is a search for my PC, I can search any file within my hundreds of thousands of files in seconds. This is also good.
What’s not good is that these two background processes in particular have no respect for its users. What I mean is these processes kicks in at the most inappropriate time, taking 50%, sometimes 100% of my 3GHz CPU, and LOTS of disk activities. It’s fine, you can suck up 50% of my CPU to do your wonderful stuff in the background when I’m checking my email, I won’t notice it. But, not when I’m playing games, when I’m watching high-definition movie, when I’m doing something CPU-intensive or hard-drive-intensive. Stop it, or just be patient and wait for your turn when I’m finished playing my games. So many times I have noticed my hard drive LED is blinking hard when I’m playing games. Actually, even by noticing that my games suddenly started lagging and dropped a lot of frames, I knew something in the background has kicked in, and I hate it.
What’s driving me even more crazy is that their behaviour is undeterminable. It can come in at any time, kicks in for 5-10 minutes, and go away. It’s just that it seem to have a bad behaviour of appearing at the wrong time. If you search these two names in Google, you’ll see that so many people have also experienced the same symptoms, so it’s not just me. So many times, before my games, I had to turn all of them off first before I started playing. I’m frustrated to say the least. Windows Vista Service Pack 1 coming early 2008 better fix all these.
Time and again, SBS Transit iris has been a great help for me. This morning, I was getting ready to get to work. I was still at home around 8.25 AM. Bus 502 that I usually take only comes around 8.35 AM, so I’m still slowly getting myself ready for work. However, when I checked iris, it said 502 is coming in 3 minutes time. I was like “What??!!!” I quickly get my shoes one, took all my belongings, and dashed downstairs. I knew I couldn’t miss this bus, or else I have to wait for another 30 minutes. As we all have experienced before, all things around us don’t quite cooperate well when we’re in rush, right? As I was waiting at the lift lobby, all three lifts were going up to 20th floor. I was like “C’mon, faster faster“. After about 20 seconds later, one of the lift arrived, I went in, and pressed level 1. It went down, and stopped at level 3. A lady was standing at the lift’s door, but didn’t come in, saying “Sorry, later.” *sigh*
The moment the lift’s door opened at level 1, I ran to the bus stop. I think I’ll probably need less than 30 seconds to run to the bus stop. From across the road, I saw bus 502 was already on the bus stop. Fortunately for me, the bus couldn’t move because of the traffic light and all other vehicles in front of it. Ten seconds later I was already in the bus, great.
In the evening, I alighted in Clementi to get my dinner. There are basically two buses that I normally take home, 105 or 52, both having EXACT same route from Clementi to Jurong East Interchange. I was checking iris again, and it reported 105 was arriving and 52 in 3 minutes. Excellent. The moment 105 came, I was walking towards the bus, when I realized there are crowds heading for that same bus. One auntie ran from behind me, and tried to squeeze her way into the crowd and into the bus, and I mean *squeeeeeeezeeeeeee*. Unusually crowded, that empty bus was squeezed to full, really full. Everyone hopped onto that bus, everyone, except me, knowing that after so many minutes it took for so many people to get into a bus, 52 would be just around the corner. I was right, or rather iris was right, just at that time when everyone has squeezed into 105, 52 sped onto that bus stop, I peacefully took that bus, empty bus with LOTS of seats. The second 52 left that Clementi’s bus stop, I glanced behind, 105 was only about to leave the bus stop, crowded. I am so grateful. 
I read it from someone else’s magazine in the bus just now:
“Marriage is not just a word. It’s a sentence man, a life sentence …“
If you have a crappy hotmail email address, and would like to change that, now it’s your chance. Microsoft is opening a registration to their @live.com email addresses now. Go and grab yours now. I’ve registered mine. Now, if you’re in my Messenger contact list, you should be getting a notification already that I’ve changed my Messenger address to
. If you live in Singapore, you’ll only get @live.com.sg choice. To get @live.com, you need to be in US, reside in US, get a friend in US to help, or any other idea you can think of. In short, only those in US gets @live.com. Any other parts of the world, you’ll only get @live.com.sg, @live.com.au, @live.co.uk, and @live.co.nz, and so on.
Besides a new @live.com, they have also released quite a number of services. Hotmail has been renamed to Windows Live Hotmail, and it’s much better now I find, though I don’t use it anymore. Windows Live Search still can’t beat Google Search. Windows Live Calendar is now in Beta coupled with Windows Live Events, to rival Google Calendar I’m sure. Windows Live Spaces for blogging, I’m not using it as well. However, one new service that you may find useful is their Windows Live SkyDrive, a free 1GB online storage for you, correctly partitioned into three sections, a private one for yourself, a shared one, and one for public. If you are the kind of person who store lots of bookmarks in your PC, and find it hard to keep bookmarks in multiple PC in sync, or had your bookmarks wiped out when you format you PC, it’s time to move your bookmarks online. There’s Windows Live Favorites for that. On desktop side, for Windows PC, they launched the usual suspects Windows Live Messenger v8.5, now added with Windows Live Writer (which I use for blogging, to write this blog post), and Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Photo Gallery (which supports uploading to Flickr), and many other more services. It’s clear Microsoft wants to ensure that with all these services, you’ll find a LOT of applications and services around you that you can and will use, and thus minimizing any chance you use services from rival Google or Yahoo.
Overwhelmed? Yeah, me too. But if you want to find any online services that match whatever you need, be it email, maps, blogging, storage, anti-virus, instant messaging, bookmarks, calendar, search, anything, a good chance you’ll probably find one that suits you in Windows Live offering.
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