Went for a job interview yesterday morning at a US listed technology company (As my current job contract end this dec – I need to get prepared if they don’t want to improve my contract – Or I should just return back to NZ?). I have about 5 years’ relevant experience doing things similar to the job requirements, so I asked for 4.5k starting salary (I mentioned that the figure is negotiable). The hiring managers kept asking me questions like… “is money important to you?”, “is your family dependent on your income?”, “how much are your peers earning?”. One of them mentioned that 4.5k is the rate for someone with about 10 years’ working experience (I don’t believe it).

The irony of it is that they know that the pay is low, probably not even enough to feed a family – they are the ones being unrealistic, not me. Welcome to Singapore, where graduates are expected to earn scarcely enough to feed or start a family.

After that I had another interview, a very different interview experience at another company. Unfortunately, the pay being offered is very low again. However, there is a very strong focus on work-life balance in this particular organization – little OT required, plenty of benefits geared towards ensuring work-life balance. I pretty much like the idea of working in this organization… and the job seems to fit exactly what I am looking for. The only downside is the salary being offered. But I might just take the low pay for the benefits.

So I made it back home, er, well, my home away from home at least. I left on the eleventh and got back on the fifteen, I still have until Saturday, but I think I’ll just set in my house and relax for a few days and call this trip off a little early. Trying to blog it obviously came out as me posting slightly incoherent blogs about my trip and then I just thought of gave up because they weren’t even that interesting for me to read.

But anyway, all in all, the first day on the ship was spent at sea with a late stopoff in Port Kalang to disembark some pasengers.
The nights on the ship were spent wandering from deck to deck, watching a one of the great shows in the theatre, gambling in the huge casino and singing in the karaoke lounge. I came second in the ‘you are the weakest link’ show and got a gold medal for my troubles. The last day on board was spent cruising from Port Kalang (Kuala Lumpur) back to Singapore, 9pm (Thursday) till 2pm on Friday. It was good going through Singapore harbour in daylight.

WordPress is a great software, but to ensure a smooth and hassle-free experience, some security measures must be taken. One great WordPress security plug-in is WordPress Firewall.

WordPress Firewall is a simple enough plug-in to use. Just install, activate and you’re good to go! It automatically blocks any suspicious looking activity on your WordPress blog, including traversal attacks, SQL injections, and other nasty attacks and hacks.

One caveat though: I realised that sometimes, the plug-in will block you when you’re in your WordPress admin panel. I found out when I was trying to upload a photo, and WordPress redirected me back to my homepage. I didn’t realise what was happening until an email came in saying that “an attack was blocked”. If that happens to you, just whitelist the page/variable and try again – it should work after that!

Download the WordPress Firewall plug-in here

Yesterday night I was thinking, life is so short… although I may have another 50 years to live based on statistics of average life expectancy… but that’s just if I am lucky (and if I take care of my health). One in four Asian will die of cancer. And that’s just cancer only…

What if I am not so lucky and die early, say maybe not too young, but perhaps at middle age (e.g. 50+)? That means from now onwards, I may only have another 30 years or so.

Furthermore, out of the X number of years I have left with my loved ones, a significant proportion of our time will go to career/work, and sleep hours. In fact we may only actually have 1/3 of our lives spent on anything else besides working and sleeping, which perhaps takes up about 2/3 of our time.

Then of course, out of the 1/3 time left, some will be spent on our individual stuff and doing other menial things like housework, etc… so in actual fact only much less than 1/3 of our lives will be spent doing things together with our loved ones…

And whether we make that little amount of time spent together meaningful time spent or not will depend on how we use the time. Thinking about this, I really feel guilty about feeling angry or upset sometimes or being unreasonable because of little things. It’s really meaningless to be angry or upset at each other when you think that we may only have so little time left to do meaningful things together.

But I suppose it is only human to experience emotions. Just a problem of how much or how often such emotions are triggered. Perhaps the problem is that my expectations are too high oftentimes. Expectations of myself, of people around me, and of the society at large. High expectations lead to disappointment and exasperation when there is failure in meeting expectations. Then it leads to frustration and unhappiness, manifested as anger/sadness at myself and others.

There is no way to objectively measure how high or low expectations are, but I guess I am somewhat of a perfectionist. I think it used to be worse. I used to have such lofty expectations that almost always I get disappointed for some reason. Nowadays I am more down to earth, but still, the perfectionist mentality is there in most things that I or other people do. Having expectations about actions or achievements is one thing, having expectations about who/what I am or other people are is probably the worst thing, since it’s much more difficult, or sometimes even impossible to change or improve such things (e.g. the fact that I have family history of cancer and thus have much higher risk of getting cancer too, unfortunately, cannot be changed).

I suppose the only way then, is to manage one’s expectations of self and of others. How do you teach a perfectionist to stop being a perfectionist? Should I see a psychiatrist and pop some pills, go for psychotherapy to do some cognitive restructuring, or learn from religion? Which one of these can give permanent results? Will I end up becoming an under-achiever when I successfully kicked my perfectionist attitudes?

This is very simple. All you have to do is find someone who is saying retarded shit, and then you respond with “O rly?”. The typical retards response will be huh?, “yes orly”, or “what’s orly?” Retards will confuse O rly? for Orally and will either be offended or proceed with the perceived command, a win/win.

I have been making my home made burgers for some time with some various results some of the nicest being a chicken and pork mince burger but it proved quite a hassle to make. The nicest and actually the most simple burger is the Italian burger.

All you will need is:

1. Lamb mince and Rosemary OR Good quality beef mince with parsley
2. Mozzarella
3. Red or green pesto
4. Chopped Onion
5. Pepper and salt
6. Optional quality buns (not the cheap fluffy chavy ones)

Mix the mince meet up with finely chopped onion (and parsley if using beef) and salt.

Make the burgers shaping them with your hands. You do not need to bind with egg etc…

Put them in the oven at 200c or shallow fry in a pan and add Rosemary on top if using lamb (You do not eat the Rosemary)

Turn the burgers over after about 8 minutes of frying and then gently add pesto to the top of the burgers with a spoon.

Slice the Mozzarella to get as much surface area as possible and add it to the top of burger while frying for 10 minutes or in the oven for 5 minutes and then serve the burgers immediately as you see the cheese melt slightly. You may also add Tomatoes etc…

I had not meant to book myself into two appointments at the same time. But I somehow knew my good luck streak would come to an end. Relying on memory and the occasional jot down on my planner is really not the way to go.

Now it is just a matter of trying to extricate myself from one or the other, and trying to postpone the appointment to another time and date.

One of my third quarter resolutions (eep, starting to sound like an analyst now) is to knuckle down and really organise my schedules and timetable. Apparently a neat desk and a neat room is not all that I should have to upkeep.

Time is a tricky thing though. It is one of the hardest things to manage and it throws up surprises when you are least prepared.

I have been having the most prolonged bout of illness the past week. All these symptoms of cold, fever, sniffles, sore throat and achy muscles, came and went at some point, and I was barely aware most of the time, having been doused with high dosages of sleep-inducing medication.

I suspect much of it was induced by the air pollution that is the haze, over the city. But let’s not point fingers to our fine neighbours who are trying to fight the flames of forest fires.

Of course, that did not stop me from living it up over the weekend. Will write more soon, be prepared for a deluge of entries and a couple of protected ones.

There has never been a better time to launch a business web site than right now. The Internet is exploding, as more people have begun to use it regularly.

Many of the businesses now piling onto the Internet may totally misunderstand this new medium. They may end up losing millions of dollars and eventually decide it’s not living up to its hype. Other businesses may totally ignore the Internet. Their competitors, meanwhile, will use it as a tool to literally steal their customers away.

As business communication medium, our web site needs the capacity to encompass the functions of marketing, advertising, research and providing corporate information. Initially, a business should focus on one or two of these key areas to determine how to establish its presence on the Internet.

For successful communication on the Internet, we should have customers come to us; customers come back to us; and an information exchange that leads to increased revenue. The Information Age has created new trends including 24-hour business days and economical access to businesses in over 130 countries populated by 20-30 million people. And, that market is growing at a rate of 30 percent per quarter for commercial use and at a rate of 25 percent a year for individual use. As a result of new technology, employees, customers and suppliers are beginning to expect improvements in quality, convenience, timeliness, variety and customization.

The first thing we should do to be successful on the Internet is target who will buy our product/paid subscription. We needs to find where these people go when they’re online? What do they do? What do they read? Can he reach them regularly and at a low cost?

There’s no point in trying to sell to a particular market if an entrepreneur can’t easily identify them and reaching them is a costly endeavor. Am i right? Ok, If the market is so specific that in order advertise to thousands of people who would never buy what he’s selling, then the Internet may not be the way to go.

The key to using the Internet successfully is attracting people. If a site isn’t user friendly, people won’t visit it, despite all the high-tech software used to design it.

A successful web site should be capable of being updated immediately while incurring marginal costs, have a multimedia combination of presentation technologies; and encourage and promote cross marketing.

The Internet use of “hyper-text”–a direct link to another web site–encourages formalizing cross marketing opportunities and strategic alliances. The Internet’s technology encourages businesses to become linked electronically. By linking with other web sites, businesses gain access to even more people who are on-line.

Our web site must not become stale, or people won’t want to keep visiting. People will return to a site if they know they’ll receive fresh information.

The technology of the Internet and the need for fresh information encourage development of an open system and design for a web site. The first screen should load quickly and provide a concise guide to the functional areas of the site. Use of an open architecture allows additions, deletions and changes to be made without extensive rewriting and reprogramming.

Above all, our business site should avoid a print mentality and not simply post its printed material on its web site. If it offers no more than what customers can obtain in print, its site will fail.

Lastly, a business’ domain name can be as important as its business name. The name should be easy to remember so customers can go directly to its web site. If a company conducts business using a registered trademark, it should be able to obtain that name for use as a domain name, although there are no guarantees that it’s not already in use by a different type of business. Meantime I think its good enough to use justidling.com (till we come up with a better name.) as the domain as its doing well so far with an average of at least 100 + of users+bots online (I started not more the 6 months). Thats indeed a good start.

My “not-so-new” tech website seems to be getting huge amount of natural searches, with type-ins amounting to more than 1k unique visitors per day complimentary from Google search. Monetary wise it’s not bringing in the dough, with more or less $1-3 generated per day but what can you expect from a site which only needs to be updated once every two weeks? If you have 100 sites that generates at least $1 a day each, you’ll make $3k gross revenue per month! I’m not that crazy though, I don’t have 100 interests to actually indulge in with the limited time I have on hand.

Anyway, I’ve registered two domain names yesterday related to world football (soccer for some of you), both are competition names, .net version. A quick check on Wordtracker and it seems the keywords are getting a few hundred searches per day. I still yet to figure out exactly the type of sites I want to build for the new domains. I’ll see how it goes, one competition will begin next year and another in two years time, so plenty of time for development!