Ok, I have some photos that I haven’t have the time to process and post. So I figure this three days holiday might be a good time to give Pixel of my life a much needed loving. You guys can stop emailing me about the photos update now. ^_^
Oh before I start, all photos are courtesy of Ryan and Huinee. Thanks guys!
Ok first thing first - graduation photos. Many of my friends graduated in December. I wish them all well and good luck in this next exciting chapter of their lives. For more photos, go here. (more…)
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Hmmph, until i get this flash player to support chinese character encoding, you guys will just have to cope with my chinglish translation. Anyway, I stumbled across a couple of good chinese songs over the holidays, hoe you guys will like it too.
When Huinee asked me what’s my new year resolution, I replied ‘dont fcuk up’.
This ‘three words resolution’ pretty much sums up my two thousands five. I messed up in 2005, maybe not in a big way, but more in a general way. I want a quiet 2006 where you wake up in the morning feeling good about your life, the squirrels chipping sounds resonating through the window, the sun stays on for more than 8 hours per day, no one dies in car accident, coffee-making process in the morning will finally ends with ‘coffee in the pot’ and not ‘coffee on the floor’, go to work, try not to ask another client to have sexual intercourse with themselves or else i will seriously lose my job, stop talking about cheesecake and actually make one myself for a change, no raccoons’ body parts on the road, cook more, no beer, finish personal projects for once, drive safe, drink safe, do more reading, less porn, and run a few miles to get rid of this little dummy tummy, no more ghost movies with those 2323 T street’s monkeys….
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I like this one a lot. I hope you will too. One of those movies I wish I have more than 2 thumbs up to give. The trailer makes it seems like a comedy but it is a very emotional movie with funny bits here and there. I went to bar with friends after watching this and found myself talking about the movie for the entire night. ^_^
You can catch the trailer here.
Continue reading if you want the bonus video. :-)
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Daddy got you a new car as a present. I am saving up right now to buy another car for you next year. For now, I can promise you i will be a good boy.
Again happy birthday to you, ma.
I am a shameless movie whore. I’ve watched a lot of movies but not all of them have a place in Daily Misery. Somehow I only write about movies I’ve watched for two reasons - either it is really good or, it sucks so bad GIMME BACK MY MONEY YOU MONKEY HOLLYWOODIANS MONEY SUCKER CHEATER SCUMBAG. Movies that dont belong to the extreme end of both sides are sort of, well forgotten.
Not anymore. When I start redesigning Daily Misery last month, I’d planned to create a movie section where I can keep a list of all the movies I’ve watched, starting this year. Also, several people have emailed me saying how those movie reviews had helped them in finding more information about a particular movie and some of them even kindly recommended me movies to watch. I really appreciate this little movie-goer community we have here. To better serve this community, I’ve created Movielicious in the project section. It comes with a rating system that will tells you guys how much loving I got from a movie. The script is homebrewed, and many thanks to Veer and komodomedia for making the css part a smoother ride for me.
So if you worship my movie ratings, go to Movielicious and hope it helps you one way or the other in deciding which movies to watch. Expect more to come in my project section over the next few weeks too!
Oh, btw, Hostel is one sicko movie.
People likes it when corporate entities apply a little sense of humor when interacting with users and potential customers.
Most of us (in computer science field or tech feeds reader) know for a fact that Google manages to find the right results for every search query as quickly as it does because at the heart of its search technology is PigeonRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University.
In fact the algorithm is so awesome they even create a very funny FAQ-alike page for it. Here’re some direct quotes from the page.
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A friend of mine, Thomas, sent this over via IM this morning.
read… its quite lame/funnni
Year 1981
1. Prince Charles got married
2. Liverpool crowned Champions of Europe
3. Australia lost the Ashes
4. Pope Died
Year 2005
1. Prince Charles got married
2. Liverpool crowned Champions of Europe
3. Australia lost the Ashes
4. Pope Died
In future, if Prince Charles decides to re-marry …. please warn the Pope!!!
:o)
Let me share some of my experiences while working on Daily Misery’s latest design.
- Font-weight:bold is ugly. For some reasons bolded text does not work for me, be it Arial or Verdana or helvetica. I guess I just love the sharpness of clean types and prefer to increase the size of the type to get the ‘bold’ effect in many cases.
- Don’t rush, the domain is yours. Take one year to design and play with it if you have to, which is exactly what i intend to do this time.
- Keep tweaking until it looks right for you no matter how many times you look at it on different screen resolutions, browsers and platforms. Your own blog/web site is the only place you can fulfill that retarded, perfectionist and pixel perfect itches of yours. Keep doing it until you get it right. Scrap the whole thing and start from scratch if you have to. This is something you can’t do on any given client projects.
- Enjoy the process for your own sake. If you can’t feel the joy while working on your own site, then maybe web development isnt exactly the right thing to build your career upon.
- Relax and chill. If you’re having one of those bad day at design-ville where nothing seems to click in photoshop or IE css bug is hitting your nerve, take a break. Go walk your dog or seat back and read your news feed. Make yourself a coffee. Have sex.
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I’ve been using these two products for two weeks now and the author and developers have promised me a hefty sum of money if i write something good about them. Not funny? K.
Measuremap
Yes, it is different from Google’s Analytics. The main differences can be seen in two areas - stats data and the presentation of the stats. Measuremap is specially tailored to track web activity/traffic for blog-oriented sites. If you’re looking for number of visits and pageviews data that are presented in a nicely done table, Measuremap isnt probably the best tool for you. It does however tracks the number of visitors (unique IP maybe?), links in/out, comments and posts and a bunch other stuff like browser agents and countries. (more…)
Time for DM’s entertainment weekly report.
- Saw three movies over the last couple of days. Fortunately, they were all not bad. None of them blew my mind away, but they gave me two good hours each. Seven swords is a medieval action movie, SPL is a gangster-police action movie and 3 iron is a weird, but lovely made Korean love story (the main actor does not even have a dialog line throughout the entire movie while the actress speaks only once, ’sarang hamnita’ near the end of the movie). A quiet movie with a very interesting storyline.
- Jay Chou’s latest mtv is really funky. I like his homey-yo-yo wannabe style. Arent the MV’s boy and girl are members of Nan Qian Ma Ma (south fist mother)? I love that group a lot too, especially their latest album. This song lasted in about 2 minutes though (is this even a real song?). Click here to watch the MV.
- Song of the week: ‘You’re beautiful’ by James Blunt.
Today I bring you the first movie that is worthy of a five super-yellow stars rating in movielicious - Perhaps Love. Yay!
This movie is a brave and ambitious effort by Peter Chan Ho-Sun. I’ve never seen anything like it before in Hong Kong movie scenes. The last musical movie from HK was done like 30 years ago, or so I heard. It is so different, yet very nicely done. Sure, there’re defects here and there but overall I like it that this movie doesn’t try to impress the audience with how grand and ‘titanic’ the love story is. It is the simplest form of love story done nicely which is really rare nowadays as people tends to forget how to even get the most basic things right. The dance choreography could have been better, but the soundtracks that drive the intensity and beauty in most scenes are splendidly done. The set is dreamy (where the hell is that place?) and the casts are…. you know what, it is really hard to write a proper review about this movie without giving too much away. So go watch it and let me know your thoughts ^_^.
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Took a little time to add some spices to alvinwoon.com’s placeholder page yesterday. Now visitors will be greeted with my big, wide and sexy smiley face everytime they hit my homepage. How cool is that?
I have a couple of Newsvine invites to giveaway. This is a must-have site for all the newsreaders out there. Peers contribution and interaction coupled with tagging and seeding capabilities make Newsvine a great place/tool to read, follow up and even discover news happening around the globe. Here’s a little quote from their company info page. Screenshots ensue.
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1.) If you haven’t know, Google doesn’t sell ads to tobacco and alcohol company. They are ok with porn. But our SEM account manager told me they are VERY strict in regards to porn advertising. Huh?
2.) Using Java can lead to death (at least according to MS licenses)
“The software product may contain support for programs written in Java. Java technology is not fault tolerant and is not designed, manufactured, or intended for use or resale as on-line control equipment in hazardous environments requiring fail-safe performance, such as in the operation of nuclear facilities, aircraft navigation or communication systems, air traffic control, direct life support machines , or weapon systems, in which the failure of Java technology could lead directly to death, personal injury, or severe physical or environmental damage”
3.) 10 Things Men Shouldn’t Yell In Victoria’s Secret
1. Oh, honey, you’ll never squeeze your fat ass into that.
2. 45 bucks?? You’re just gonna end up NAKED anyway!!
3. The Miracle What??? This is better than world peace!!
4. Will you model this for me???
5. No need to wrap it up. I’ll eat it here.
6. Oh, the size won’t matter. She’s inflatable.
7. Mom will love this.
8. I’ll be in the dressing room going blind.
9. No thanks, just sniffing.
10. Does this come in children’s sizes?
Hat tip: forgetfoo and darksideprogramming
I’ve wanted to write about my madz cooking skill for a while but all these stupid web thingies and movie reviews keep filling my posting space. Part of it is also due to the fact that I can almost never remember my cooking ingredients right after I finish eating. Weird but true. The doctor said it has something to do with how my digestive system reacts to an over consumption of sodium, resulting a short circuit in my neuron nerves prompting an instant but critical short term memory lost of what had happened 30 minutes prior to this whole chain-reacted syndrome.
Anyway, even a hardcore hacker has to stuff that empty tummy. So today is the day I want to document my program cooking and release the source code ingredient and API recipe so that everyone out there can build, develop and redistribute it back to the community. Without much delay, I hereby present to you the first of 4 series from ‘Alvin’s da cook funk yo yo yo bah bah bah’. Instructions are shown in caption under the following images.
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So our network admin brought in an expresso maker today. He was kind enough to show me how it works. Before that, I was given an intensive course over what’s the difference between a normal coffee, an expresso and a cappucino, much to my annoyance even though I didn’t know anything about coffee. Just let me taste the damn expresso!
Basically it breaks down like this:
Expresso is normally 4 or 5 times stronger than normal coffee. That explains why most people drinks it with a small cup (you dont want too much caffeine in your system). Cappucino is basically a watered down version of expresso. Something like 1/3 of the cup is filled with expresso while the other 2/3 is filled with cream/milkshake/sugar.
My first expresso tasted dark, rich and thick but I loved it. No more normal coffee for me!
Ok this Japanese guy (or so they said) brought Pachelbel’s Canon in D to a whole new level. You will go speechless, trust me. Some very nice riffs and slides in there. It took me about a month on and off to master the accoustic version and then he just, he just… bastard.
hat tip: Su Ann
Update: Thanks to iwishchan, here’s his official website. From the look of his domain name, it looks like he is a taiwanese.
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I prepare a little delicacy for all Daily Misery’s readers for this coming Chinese New Year. Hit the refresh button on your browser and everyone gives me my *ang pao!
This year is the dog year - my year! woot!
*ang pao - red packet stuffed with money.
I’ve been getting more emails than usual lately and it’s getting hard for me to keep up with my try-to-reply-every-emails motto. Over time, it had also turned into a somewhat repetitive process when the same questions kept reappearing. So I thought maybe an f&q session would make all of our lives easier. Here’re the 5 most frequently asked questions over the last few weeks.
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