Just at the moment I logged into my terminal at the office, I received this e-mail:

Urgent Message from TELEKOM

To those who have a telekom home phone, please read. Here is the original text received from Telekom:

If you get a call from someone identifying himself as a phone technician performing a test, and this person asks you to touch nine(9), zero(0),hash sign (#) and then hang up… Please REFUSE TO DO SO!

By pushing 90#, you are giving the individual, who called you, access to your telephone line and allowing them to place a long distance call with the charges appearing on your telephone bill.

We were further informed that line scam has been originating from many of the local jails/prisons.

Please pass the word around.

This is not exactly a hoax, but I find it cute that people love to add spices to make it sounds more appealing to the reader. A quick check around Google reveals that this message have been circulating around since as early as 1997. Definitely NOT from Telekom Malaysia, and this “bug” usually only applies to offices or hotels that uses a PABX system (often they need to push 9 in order to dial an outside number).

Chances are it will not affect home landline and mobile phone users.

More info:
- #90 Phone Scam at Urban Legends Reference
- A user explaining this in a public forum

After sending Bebe to class earlier, I went to Cyberjaya Terminal’s car wash to get the car washed before my old man claim it later this week. When I arrived there’s another car in the washing bay, so I parked my car next to it and tell the operators that I only want the outside cleaned (without the vacuum).

Ok how here’s the cute part.

The people then started washing my car. I was wondering why they don’t wash the other car, because normally after they finished washing, they would move the car out of the bay to be dried/vacuumed. Then, I just realized that there are still people inside, two girls to be exact. Guess what they’re doing in there?

They’re chatting with each other.

Give about almost ten minutes when they started opening the door and one of them have one of their feet on the ground, yet still talking to each other with excitement. I wonder what the excitement is all about. A few more minutes later then manages to get out of the car. Before either of them managed to move more than 4 feet away from the car, then turned back and started opening the rear passenger doors.

“Huh?” I thought. I am observing them if you couldn’t tell. From one of the seats nearby.

They’re still chatting with each other (the other one goes to the other side of the car and, too, opened the other rear passenger door) across the car. From rooftop till they both bent into the car, and they took out some stuff (I can only recall a rainbow-colored bolster and a few magazines). Then one of them opened the trunk and put the stuff in, followed by the other.

So now, we have two passenger doors and a trunk open. Guess what?

They’re still chatting.

One of them placed her hand on the trunk door and the other hand covering her armpit. What puzzles me is that why did she wear the almost-no-sleeve shirt if she doesn’t want people to see her armpit? Then…

…they are still chatting.

I think it must’ve been another full five minutes before they closed all doors, tell the operators what to do with their car, and hand them the keys.

At this point, my car is washed clean and dried. I paid and off I go.

Tell me something guys, is this a common thing in ladies or it’s just me?

I was sitting on the edge of this 11th floor, looking out of the window, looking at groups and groups of people walking around during office lunch break.

A few cars go in and out the expensive parking lot. A bus drive into the pickup area. Blue bus, with the company logo on it. Swarms of people went into the bus, flashing their tags to the bus driver as they step in to make sure they can take the free ride. It is exclusive.

Others just walk and cross the big highways, risking their lives in order to get food. Not that there’s no food nearby this place, but perhaps years and years of having the same thing at the same area probably bore them. They needed something new, people always need that.

Obtaining something new is the simplest form of satisfaction. Getting away with the same thing for very long time, on the other hand, needs a lot of courage, and perhaps resources. Depends on how you see it.

Normal sign everyday, everywhere in this big, sophisticated and unpredictable hill. Okay, maybe you can call this cluster of buildings a small city on its own.

And then this little thing comes. Flying upwards. Well, not exactly little for its kind.

A Butterfly. Yep.

Four inches wide, black colored with bright green spots along its wings. Very pretty.

I watched this little thing flew up to the other floors upstairs without making any real effort.

I smiled, and went back to my seat to resume my daily routine at his company.

Then it struck me.

Butterflies can fly till 11th floor!?

If you ever got an email that have similar content as the one below:

"Hey, Just got this from CNN, Osama Bin Laden has been captured! Go to the link below to view the pics and to download the video if you so wish: (Internet address) "Murderous coward he is." God bless America!"

... and it come with an attachment, supposedly an image of him being hung to death. Immediately delete this e-mail, and don't ever try to open the attachment, or worse, forward it to all your friends.

Why? This e-mail is a two-timer: A Hoax and a Malicious Virus!

Upon launching this, a trojan (virus) will be installed into your computer, the most common variant is Trj/Small.B.

This might be very old (dated as far as 2004 if I'm not mistaken). However, recently I've gotten a few of such e-mails alone, and as well as some warning e-mails telling others about this hoax. Do everyone a favor by not forwarding this e-mail to everyone you know, and better still, tell the sender about it!

More Reading:
- PandaSoftwares
- Urban Legend : Osama Captured/Hanged
- 'Osama Captured' E-mail is Malicious Trojan at Internetnews.com
- TruthOrFiction.com
- Microsoft Most Valuable Professional
- BreakTheChain.org

Other Related Info:
- The Top Twelve Threats No Computer User Should Ignore at PracticalPC.com

Everybody knows the existence of the world's innovative search engine's free e-mail service that is known as GMail. A few of my close friends would be noticing that I am pretty much obsessed with GMail. A few is still wondering why, because to them GMail interface is crap, plain and boring. I will try my best to explain why I LOVE GMail so much.

#1 - GMail is somewhat exclusive

This is my very first impression of it. You'll need to be invited by current users in order to be able to have one account. In order to be invited you will need either an existing e-mail address or a mobile phone (that's the alternative way of signing up in Malaysia at least). Sure, maybe anybody can simply create an email account out of the freely available providers like Hotmail or Yahoo! but if you don't know anybody that uses GMail, chances are you might not be able to obtain the invite.

Oh, in case you want an invite, you can ask me about it. I've got plenty left!

#2 - Tons of disk space

Even though Google still somewhat limits the maximum attachment size that is allowed to be sent out, the total amount of space you are given in your account is huge! Back then, GMail started with about 1 Gigabytes of mail space, and it was increased rapidly at their anniversary. At the moment, it is about 2.7 Gigabytes of mail storage, and this number keeps on increasing every second! (more...)

Note: If you want to learn how to troubleshoot layer positioning bugs, you can skip to the last part of this post.

Made some changes to the layout a little bit. I'm not keen in changing to a totally new layout, because I kind of like this one so much, as it is very practical. Removed the annoying images in the AdSense around this site. It works really well, but I just felt annoyed with it, so I removed it for the time being. I have also added another column to the sidebar, so I don't have a super-long sidebar in order to fit all the stuffs that I need to. Should be able to see the sidebar's contents without needing to scroll down much. Removed the plane icons on the header, and reduced the big margin on the left to zilch, so that I can have wider space for the postings (since it is already compromised by the wide sidebar).

As always, every time I changed the layout, it ALWAYS failed on Internet Explorer a.k.a IE. I shouldn't be bothered because I love Firefox, but I pity my readers because still quite a lot of them are using IE. The bug doesn't cause any readability problems, but it made the sidebar once again shift to the bottom, take a look (click on the image to enlarge it) at the screenshot.

Maybe I need to stay at home and fiddle a lot more with the margins. Last time I had this similar problem but I managed to fix it with some margin adjustments, but it took me the whole night.

I am using the Negative Margin approach. If anybody have any solution (hopefully permanent) to my IE Miseries, please let me know!

Small Update @ 14:59 2006.07.11

New Features

Most of the new addons are administrative tools, however, I have two new features for the visitors:

Post subscription - Yes now you can opt to subscribe to any post you like, so if anybody commented on the post, you will get the comments as well!

(Probably) Related Post - Now, a list of possibly related post (based on keywords) is listed down underneath the current open post. Who knows some of them might be handy :)

Small Update @ 00:12 2006.07.12

I got the site working in IE. Some mis-resized image is pushing the sidebar to the left, hence bringing it down. However, now another problem occured. In Firefox, the page seems to scroll to the side, even though when nothing visible is there. I've put borders at all possible DIVs and elements, but I couldn't figure out why the empty space appears.

If anybody can tell me what I did wrong, I would be appreciated. I'll pimp your site!

Small Update @ 00:30 2006.07.12

I've managed to figure out what's the culprit that causes my page to scroll sideways in both Firefox and Opera. It is the header image DIV! I don't know for what ever reason it suddenly decided to have a full 100% width, and with the initial 45px margin I placed on it, results an extra 45px space on the right of the page instead.

How did I finally manage to figure it out? There's a cute trick you can use to troubleshoot your layer and positioning bugs should you couldn't figure it out. At the end of your Style Sheets (CSS) file, place the following line:

... and then reload your page, you should be seeing something like this:

click on the thumbnail above to enlarge the picture

After the quick fix in the CSS, my page finally appears like this:

Looks okay now isn't it? Don't forget to remove that magical CSS code from your Style Sheets!

Usually I wouldn't bother about some weird kid on the loose blogging about every single little thing they can talk about. Freedom they say. Yeah whatever!

However, today I just happen to stumble upon a few blogs that tickles me so much that I had to blog about it. Let's see our contestants (note that the phrase to the right of the colon sign designates in general what they say in their posting, summarized to one line):

Kid #1: OMG She's Fugly!

Okay, so we have this one young lady that is showing her fang of b**tchism (sorry for the profanity, but I couldn't find any better word to describe it). Basically she's developing an ultimate sense of superiority (like she owns the world), extra-high self-confidence. Let's me quote one of her sentences (you can read her whole post to understand what is it about):

Maaa, that girl is ugly.
She can't help it. Look at her parents.

Yeah, and I present to the world, our next generation girls. Nasty. I hope one day she will eat a whole length of a steel pipe thanks to her comments.

Kid #2 : I have a big penis!

This is so cute I was confused of whether I want to laugh or cry. It have nothing to do with the subject matter, but it is more and more apparent that they now really blog about anything - YES I HAVE A BIG D*CK! Another extra-high self-confidence ready to be shattered.

Okay why am I worked up over this stuff? Maybe I'm a bit on the sensitive side, but these are the kids that is going to grow up with these mindset (and standard) buried into their minds. Yes, I'm not afraid to simply point it up to them this way, if they ever discover this entry. Because I'm not going to be happy living my old days when the future parliament only talk about how that person is so ugly thanks to their parents or how big one's penis is.

Somehow it reminds me of my friend's statement "Maybe the pig is ashamed because it parents are pigs". Perhaps unrelated here.

On the side note, here are Bebe’s reactions to their blogs:

bebe: wtf man these people adoi
bebe: she's ugly
bebe: i have a big cock
bebe: x.x
bebe: wtfnthnaothsnteh'/r,hetoha hte '=,
bebe: x.x!!
me: shes fugly, i have a big cock and i wanna be old!
bebe: heh
bebe: *scratches head*
bebe: and they're the next generation warghhhhhhhhh
me: yeh
bebe: this drives me insane!!!!
me: x.x
bebe: oh you better include my reaction in your post as well x.x

/end of b*tching

Maybe we should start saying "With great freedom, comes stupidity"

Alright, I'm sick of seeing my GMail's "100 Invites Left" on the sidebar, even after inviting all my contacts into the mail. If anybody would love an invite, please post on the Comments below, using your valid E-Mail address (in the Email field, don't post it in the comment field, if you got spammed it's not my fault!)

p/s: Don't worry, I'm not in any way going to spam your e-mail nor will I sell it to anybody!

GMail features at-a-glance:

- Lightweight, intuitive and very clean interface
- 2.7 Gigabytes of mail storage - never need to delete your emails again
- Autosave feature while composing - never loose your hard-typed e-mails again in case of any computer issues
- Innovative "Labels" (something like Folders in conventional mail services) that allows flexibility it tagging your emails
- POP access and Email forwarding
- Easily acessed via WAP @ http://m.gmail.com/

So ladies and gentlemen, if any of you wants the invite, just post down here, I'll get it done ASAP!

Edit : I'v stopped this offer, because some individuals just don't appreciate what I'm doing. You guys who is hoping for one, look elsewhere.