If you are in the market for a SUV in the next 18 months, you are in for a big threat in the form of sleek looking SUVs, the Mazda CX-5 and Ford Escape 2013. Speed and frugal fuel consumption seem to be CX-5′s forte but power belongs to the 2013 Escape, at least judging from the spec sheets. The CX-5 speedometer tops at 260kmph, while the Escape at 240kmph.
And don’t forget, the new Honda CRV is coming as well. Spoilt for choice? You bet!
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And hopefully it’s going to be the new iPhone 5, whatever the price may be and no matter how long it takes for the phone to reach my shore. Know why? Because I think the new iPhone, to be unveiled next week, will have a lot to offer for snap-shooting.
Rumour has it that the new iPhone will have an 8-megapixel back side illuminated sensor from Sony.
Let's talk then
However, this is not what makes the iPhone 5 compelling to snap-shooters; it’s the availability of creative effects that makes the new iPhone an indispensable tool for photography enthusiasts if the leaked specs are anything to go by.
It’s the support for creative photography that makes the iPhone 5 a whole new species compared to the existing iPhone 4.
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A hot new entrant into the world of online media, The Mole, is fast losing its millions — on Alexa rank, that is.
Launched a week ago, The “We Don’t Care” Mole climbs down, or up, depending on how you see it, from rank number 22,000,000 in the world just last week to number 1,986,688 today.
Yesterday it was at number 3,300,000 or so. Meaning, it had jumped more than a million rungs on Alexa overnight. In Malaysia, The Mole currently stands at number 6,151.
Won’t be surprised if it reaches the Top 100,000 most visited sites in the world within a month; that’s how it goes in the world wide web — you improve your rank as you pull in the traffic. The Mole hasn’t had any rank on Google though.
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[UPDATE Aug 24: Ah... TM called this morning while I was at work to say they might have repaired my connection. They said they had change the port at the Idontknowhere and that I was to switch on the modem when I got back home to see if the ADSL was lighting. I arrived home at about 9pm and the first thing I did was to switch on the thing and, yes, it was lighting! My Stremyx is back!]
ORIGINAL ENTRY BELOW:
For some reasons unknown to anyone — well, no one seems to know what has gone wrong with it or how to fix it — my Streamyx connection at home has gone kaput. The ADSL light on the modem is off permanently.
At the time of this writing, I’ve already lodged three complaints to TM’s 100 line but the problem persists.
Each time I made the complaint, I was told to reset the modem, check the cable connection, told to connect the modem directly to the wall phone socket, changed the DNS server setting on my laptop, but nothing seemed to work.
According to a staff at the call centre — after telling me to run the “ipconfig” command and me reporting back the readings — there is nothing wrong with my modem. Everything seems fine except that I can’t connect to the Internet. Man, it’s been eight days already.
At the rate things are going, my Streamyx woes look set to go on indefinitely. At the moment, my relationship with the service provider, TM, is no longer that of a client and a service provider, but that of a complainant and a listener. I complain, they listen; I complain again and they listen again, and again and again.
In the meantime, in my attempt to think outside the Streamyx box, I’m using my Nokia N8 as a wireless modem. Currently, as a stop-gap measure, I’m subscribing to DiGi’s weekly 250MB plan, priced at RM15 — that is an additional cost I will have to bear because of Streamyx connectivity problem. So, I rugi dua kalilah.
Even then, the DiGi’s weekly plan is slow at 384Kbps, hardly an ideal speed for an active online activity. I still need Streamyx, you hear that, TM? You may not need me but I need you like a fish needs water.
How do you turn the Nokia N8 into a wireless modem is quite a straight-forward affair. First, download the eZSpot app from Nokia’ Ovi Store for RM6 and install it on the phone. Launching the app will turn the phone into a wireless moden.
The next step is pretty simple — just allow your computer to detect the signal and connect to it.
However, this is hardly an ideal solution due to the lack of speed. Blogging will be a painstaking affair, especially if your blog involves a lot of data such as a large number of photographs or videos, and especially if you want to open websites in multiple tabs.
I still need Streamyx though I don’t know when can I resume using it. I’m giving myself until the first week of next month to assume the role of a complainant. If they still refuse to fix my line, then what’s the point. I may try those ugly USB broadband thing and see if it can handle my online activities.
NOTE: This entry is posted using the N8 as a wireless connection. This is an unedited article so you are bound to find spelling or grammatical mistakes because I’m to lazy to edit and post this article over and over again over a less than ideal Internet connection speed.
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Man, Amy Winehouse is dead. Her life ended just hours ago at the age of 27. Her lifeless body was found in her London apartment, according to reports now spreading over the Internet like a wildfire. It is not known yet at this hour what caused her death but people will be quick to associate it with her prolong problems with alcohol. It’s damning someone has to die at that age because of it.
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This song reminds me of an uneasy and lonely night drive many years back along the old Kimanis-Keningau road in Sabah, the Malaysian state on Borneo Island. It was an unnerving solitary journey across the Crocker Range because of the road conditions; you could get stuck in the mud somewhere nowhere in pitch dark or you car might break down in the punishing trail.
All I had for company was a Norah Jones CD. Didn’t know how many times she had sung she didn’t know why she didn’t come during the journey.
And when the song “Come away with me in the night” was playing, I couldn’t help but imagining that someone, or something with unsmiling eyes, was singing along in the back seat!
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The iPhone 4 was very much in my heart when I decided to buy Nokia N8, the 12-megapixel large sensor smartphone, last year. It was the N8′s camera, built around a 1/1.83-inch sensor, Carl Zeiss optic and Xenon flash, that made me go for it.
You know how the saying goes — the one that says the best camera is the one you have with you. However, I can’t be carrying an old mobile phone with a camera that only has 1.3 megapixel in resolution and claim it to be the best camera that I have with me, hence the decision to go for the N8.
Tuning into the cloud
Sure, the camera on the iPhone is good but nothing beats the N8, at that time and perhaps even to date, in terms of how well put the camera features are, notable of which is the sensor.
The sensor on the N8 is still unrivaled by any camera phone to date. It is big by a camera phone’s standard and even bigger than the sensor found on ordinary compact cameras. And you know what the drill basically is — the larger the sensor, the better the image quality.
Takeaway ...
But photography apps are the area where Apple iPhone really shines. Nothing beats iPhone’s richness in terms of photography apps; and Hipstamatic and Instagram, to me, are among the best photography apps to date.
Did I regret buying the N8, which has an excellent camera system but lack the supporting apps?
In a way yes, but no worries, I’m sure iPhone wouldn’t stop at 4. There’s always iPhone 5 to look forward to. I hear the camera on the iPhone 5 will go eight megapixel. No?
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I don’t know what to do with this blog; and for someone who has been blogging for quite sometime, that is quite a profound statement. A man who loves blogging but didn’t know what to do with a blog that carries his own name. His own name!
This is one of the many blogs that have never made it to the cruising speed. It keeps on changing course and restarting and losing its direction.
In no hurry ... an elderly man enjoying his morning coffee at a stall on the fringe of Kuala Lumpur city
It is now restarting again, this time as a lifestyle blog. Let’s see if it can reach its cruising altitude this time around.
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Are you sure that ours is the only planet inhibited by living organism in this entire universe? I doubt it. I mean, surely there are other planetary ecosystems that support living things, which may or many not take the form we are familiar with.
And if there are, wouldn’t it be logical to think that they might also be wondering the same and trying to find answer to this poser. The footage below might be an elaborate hoax but hey, if curiosity can kill the cat, it can also kill an alien being.
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I spent the whole night last night and the whole day today trying to sleep away the fever. Sleep must have been therapeutic for I feel much better waking up in the evening. I gather that I’ve slept a total of 16 hours, part of the luxury of being home alone and being off from work.
Earlier in the day I was awaken by the phone ringing. It was at first ringing in my dream, then it grew louder, jolting me out of sleep. It was my son Adrisonn, said he wanted to talk to me about a lot of things. Then he asked me if I was okay already.
Playing ... taken with a Nokia N8
I told him, yes, I was alright; still coughing and sneezing and all, but I was alright. He chuckled and asked if I had thought of any new jokes to tell him apart from the one about a man making phone call in the toilet.
I told him I hadn’t thought of any new joke yet. But son, don’t you realise, you dad is a joke himself, I wanted to say but couldn’t. At seven he is too young to understand the complicity of adult life.
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The door swung open on the second ring and out came a man you can only describe as Ordinary Joe. Wearing a pair of over-sized khaki shorts and an under-sized polo t-shirt, he smiled and said I must be that reporter who kept bugging him for the interview.
I said, yes, I was the one who called you. I then apologised for being late — 15 minutes late for the interview — but he brushed aside the apologies and said it was okay because he had no pressing matters to do that day.
He swung open the gate and invited me in, his right hand stretching towards the door. “You don’t look like someone who has a very strong pair of hands as I imagined,” I said as I made my in, a remark that invited a chuckle. “In my line of job,” he said, “You don’t need a strong hand.”
“You do need a strong heart, though,” he added later when we were in his living room. “Now what can I offer you, coffee, tea or the noose?”
Nice try, Mr Jocobus, but I think I’ll have coffee for a start, I said. The smiley icons hung in the air.
His coffee was bitter, the bitterness compensated by what must have been a generous amount of sugar. Coffee from hell, Mr Jocobus? But I dared not ask the question.
… to be continued
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If you have a hobby, there is every likelihood that tens of thousands of others share the same pastime, which is a good thing, because you would have a ready-made audience should you ever decide to blog about it.
I do a lot of blogging and run numerous blogs, one of which is about photography.
Although having no proper training, blogging diligently about things related to photography enables me to gain knowledge about cameras, lenses, sensor technologies, some snap-shooting techniques, industry trends and so on — an insight otherwise impossible to gain if I had not pursued this hobby through blogging.
In the process, I gain a small following — around 700 unique visitors a day, mostly from the US.
Having 700 visitors a day, however, is no big deal. A popular Malaysian blogger, covering the web design niche, receives no less than 5,500 visitors an hour — I reckon that he is now earning around the middle average of a six-figure income a year.
But even at the meagre amount of 700 unique visitors daily, there is still a pocket money to be made — not much but enough to cover the annual hosting costs, the purchase and renewal of domain names and some of my photography gears.
Where does the pocket money come from? They come from numerous sources, one of which is Google Adsense. Then there are also other ad networks, which together, contribute to the small income stream.
In any blogging endeavour, however, you need traffic. If you have 24,000 visitors a day and the bulk of them are from the US, you can actually earn more than just pocket money. With that kind of traffic, you maybe able to earn at least US$1,600 a month.
However, this also depends on the niche area you are blogging about. A sociopolitical blog averaging 24,000 visitors a day many not be as successful, in terms of dollars and cents, compared to a lifestyle or a tech blog which has the same amount of visitors.
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When I googled for the word “kesampean” — google is a valid verb, right? — the search engine shot back with a question: Did you mean: kesampaian? It did list down, however, entries with the word kesampean, which is an old Indonesian spelling for the same word in Bahasa Malaysia. Not sure if the word is still spelled that way in Indonesia. Maybe not anymore, otherwise why would Google question?
Over the years, I’ve read stories about hajat yang tidak kesampaian – loosely meaning “unrealised dream” — particularly in accident stories.
Yes, I meant to search for kesampaian
Like for instance a man who died in an accident a week before his wedding and the story goes, hasrat seorang pemuda untuk berkahwin dengan kekasihnya tidak kesampaian apabila dia terbunuh dalam kemalangan or “a man’s dream of marrying his sweetheart was shattered when he was killed in an accident.”
I don’t know, but something about the manner the story is presented makes the little guy in the encephalonentophicIntelligious Majoras‘ basement raise the flag.
The man in the story no longer had a way of knowing if his hajat had been kesampaian; only those who are alive were aware about it. So, isn’t it the hajat of the those who are still alive is the one that has been shattered? What about the hajat of the man’s sweetheart?
Can’t we just say a man was killed in an accident a week before his wedding? Would that make the story less creative?
In any case, hajat yang tidak kesampaian as a news intro is a dead horse. It has been flogged over and over again since 60s.
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I hate it when I lose control of the things I can control. Smoking, for instance. I’ve been successful in keeping the c-sticks at bay for three years but fell into it again because of one careless light up, thinking I can worm my way out should addiction kick in.
You know how it is with nicotine; you stop for a while but once you succumb to the crave for one stick, you are putting the noose around your neck and tightening it. Do that with the second stick and you are hooked, making it a gargantuan task to wriggle yourself out of the rope.
There is only one way to succeed in any quit-smoking attempt: you quit cold turkey and wrestle with the withdrawal syndrome for three weeks. Once you past the three-week psychological barrier, the noose starts loosening.
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