I was reading an article from Article City about useful online tools for bloggers and that article triggered me into writing this. It was a good article that the writer had written but I do have some things to add to his opinions.

I do agree on his opinion is adding videos to certain blog posts to make the post more interesting and getting about to learning how the traffic of a website works is a must if the blogger is heading into a full time blogging profession.

However the article has forgotten to input certain aspects like having the basic knowledge of picture editing and basic website designing. Picture editing is very important for all website owners since the pictures they post could be taken by other users and repost it under their name instead of the original graphic designer. Thus, adding in a watermark on all your pictures is a must to stop the pictures being recirculated for others usage. Adobe Photoshop is one of my favourite software to edit and create new designs.

Basic knowledge in website designing and programming is a must for bloggers. Ask any bloggers or website owners about debugging errors and they will sure to inform you that almost every month, there is bound to have some errors popping in on their website. I’ve had my fair share of my website creating errors especially every time my Wordpress platform upgraded itself. Editing the errors can be a chore and a lot of hassle so it is advisable for all website owners and blogs to learn a thing or two about HTML and PHP codes.

To make website programming editing easy, I have used a free software called Notepad ++. Sure you can always use the normal Notepad software found in your Accessories but Notepad ++ shows the line numbers, coding colors to make your debugging life more easier. You can easily get the free software from CNET.

Bending over and fussing over the old car wirings for a week or so is not my cup of tea to enjoy my life. But it was worth it. I managed to get everything up and set up a new workable and hassle free electrical wiring for the radiator fan.

However the circuit for my air-con is still under construction. I had all the wires and circuit up but unfortunately I couldn’t find the wires to the air-con blower fan. The wires were impossible to trace as I couldn’t get my hands reach into the main terminal. But I’m not going to give up. After a day or two of relaxation, I will find the error.

Anyway Arul returned from his camp after his 2 weeks stay in Tekong. He brought home lots of humorous stories of his bunk mates and officers. He had lost weight, 4kg in fact and I think he became a little bit quieter after his initial 2 weeks stay. He has to report back to his camp by 6pm today, so that will be 2weeks down and 5  and 2weeks more to go.

Furthermore I saw his insurance cover and was flabbergasted. $150,000 minimum! He’s worth at least $150,000 the moment he signed in as a National Service Men. I’m only covered at Rm10,000.. drat it!

Oh yeah, if anyone is ever interested in getting a good Rochester personal injury lawyer like Haziq & Co in Malaysia, don’t hesitate in visiting the site I’ve added. I heard they are really good at getting every penny out to support your case

Ayu trying to cook

It’s Sunday and this means I’m a chemist in my kitchen! This time I made Wanton chicken, fresh from my own kitchen and not from the frozen packs that you can easily get from the supermarkets.

I don’t use pork since I’m a Muslim and instead I used chicken. You can get frozen minced chicken meat from the supermarket. I had used quite a few brands of chicken meat found in Malaysia and I prefer Farmbest Brand anytime. It’s cheap and very nice.

Furthermore I’d advice for Wanton Lovers to always keep frozen minced chicken in their fridge as a spare. The recipe is so simple and easy. You can also just whip it up in minutes.

I also uses crab meat sticks as a replacement for shrimps. It’s cheaper…

Ingredients:-

• 300gm minced chicken meat
• 3 sticks of crab meat, cut into small pieces
• 4 sticks of Chinese Parsley (daun sop), chopped
• 1 stick of Spring Onion, chopped
• 1 tsp pepper
• 1tsp black pepper
• 1tsp Sesame seed oil
• 3tsp soy sauce
• 1 pack of wanton skins

1) To make the filling of the wanton, mix everything in a bowl and leave it to marinate for an hour.

2) Take a slice of the wanton skin, taking half a teaspoon of the filling and place it at the center of the skin. Taking an edge of the skin, fold the skin into half and clamp the edges tightly with your fingers. You can also use a normal batter of flour and water to make it as a glue to hold the edges together.

Keep repeating the process untill all of your fillings have been used up. Once you are done with it, you can either fry your wanton or cook it with chicken soup.

I put my wanton in my Tom Yam soup.. yummy!!

I am frantically searching for the repair manual of Honda Civic 1981. It’s not as if I do not know how to repair the wiring but I just had enough of the nonsense my car is putting me through. I had rewired the cooling fan and air con fan wiring due to the naked wires that had been eaten away by wear and tear over the years.

I had followed and marked all the wires to their connection but when I inserted the the new wires to their original connection, the cooling fan and air con fan turned on without the car being keyed to “ON”. In this case I knew that I had bypassed the relay.

No matter how I tried the fans insist on being on. Now I have to recheck the relay and the trace the whole circuit in case I accidentally put the relay on NC (normally close) circuit. I hate it.. So hate it.

Anyway I have to head back to the car now. In the meantime, those who wishes to get an insurance home and do not know where to get the best home insurance quote, please drop by at the link before mentioned. Insuring your home is a must since you may never know when a disaster may hit your house and fire accidents are nasty.

Users especially Wordpress users surely would have come across with the plug in called Gravatar once in a while. Gravatar plug-in can usually be seen when the Wordpress users have activated it and is present when a visitor wishes to put in his/her comments.

Gravatar is a shorter name to its orignal, Globally Recognized Avatars. It conjures up an avatar/ icon/ picture of the user whenever the user has left a comment in a blog, website or community forums. It creates a more closer community to see an avatar of the user instead of just plain words. In fact, it distinguishes the user from others, making each user unique.

How to know if Gravatar is present in website I’m in?

It’s simple. Click on the comment link to leave a comment in the post/website. Just fill up the form you see there and leave your comments. Once your comment is approved by the admin, you can see the avatar/icon placed in the comment you had left. See below for sample.

If there are comments left by previous visitors, you can easily detect the Gravatar plug-in by looking at the icons given randomly on each comment user. If the user has an account with Gravatar, his own unique avatar/icon will pop up instead of the normal random icon. You can view it below.

How to get my Own Unique Gravatar?

Just visit www.gravatar.com and register yourself in. It only takes less than 5 minutes to register and upload your picture in. Simple!

Been a very hectic weekend that almost re-wired my biological clock. I didn’t have enough sleep and kept thinking of the error that caused a 15Amp fuse in my car to trip. After 3days of tracing and disassembling the wires in my fuse box, I finally managed to find the fault.

First, it was caused by a shorted wire that has hidden in the boot compartment. The wires had been eaten by wear and tear over the years, its a 1981 Honda Civic. The load wire that connected my tail light  along with the neutral and other wires had melted together, most probably caused by a minor short circuit and spreaded to a major short circuit.

I had thought that was the end, so I had inserted another fuse in the fuse box but it blew on me again. Then I traced the wiring to the front of the car, where the headlight was. Since it is an old car, I had to scrub off all the grime and dirt on every wire to make sure that the same error didn’t apply to the wires.

Sure enough, the front headlight wires were shorted. Even though the cut was small and couldn’t be seen unless all the grime had been taken off, the impact it made on my fuse box could very well cause another major short circuit.

To solve the minor bare cut on the wire, I had to make sure that the bared wire still had a strong continuity to itself before I taped it off with an electrical insulating tape that could withstand high temperatures.

Once that was done, I once again inserted the fuse and voila! My 3 days headache was solved. Too bad for me, the faulty circuit is not claimable by insurance company else I would have been enjoying my weekends. Perhaps I should re-read the auto insurance quote brochures which I had taken a while back from my visit to the insurance company.

Unfortunately now my Air Con relay is fried. Not sure what happened since I had changed the relay to a newer one so now I need to head back to the drawing board.

I have never once in my entire life yawned and felt sleepy in a cinema, trying to watch a movie until I watched Blood: Last Vampire. In the first 20mins of the show, I had yawned four times, stretched my arms in the air and forced my eyes to open as the pictures flashed in front of me.

The story started off with a boring start and I was expecting some good old blood and gore since it was rated as NR18. I had waited and waited and when Saya, the main character of the story, got caught in the center of the vampire city, I was extremely disappointed with the lame fighting and badly done graphics.

They had overdone and over emphasize on the graphic of splattered blood in 3D form, somewhat like Matrix until they had forgotten to make the fighting scenes scary with blood and gore.  It seems that the makers of the film had engaged a toddler to choreographed the fighting scenes. Scratch that, my 4yr old niece and her 1yr+ old younger brother fights better!

There was no blood, no gore and no scenes that made me close my eyes to hide the gruesome scenes. Wait! There were a few times my eyes were closed, I had almost nodded off to sleep while watching the story.

There were a lot of scenes that should have been in but wasn’t and left viewers scrambling trying to figure out what had happened in the story’s history. For example in the scene where Alice had brought her to an empty house after the run in with the vampires, Saya was injured, a shot wound in her lower right abdomen.

Where in the world did Saya got that? It couldn’t have been from the shot that the crazed agent shot. The agent had shot Luke who was in front of Saya and its impossible for the bullet to penetrate Luke since the angle she was in was not in the angle of the bullet should it even penetrate through Luke.

There were a few times I had to roll my eyes in exasperation and slap my forehead at the bad graphics whenever Saya or another character made a huge jumping scene. It looks like a badly done game graphics. The jump looked exactly like Devil May Cry jump scenes. In fact Devil May Cry looks better!

The party pooper of the whole movie was the badly spoken English words that were garbled out of Onigen’s mouth. Sure, I understand that the actress is a Japanese but why can’t she practice heavily on her English speaking? The first few parts when she spoke in English was at least understandable.

But the ending scene!! Kami-sama! She might as well had spoken in alien tongue. I couldn’t understand a word she was talking about and had to rely on the Malay translation for it. She might as well have spoken in Japanese, at the very least it sounds better than her try in English tongue.

Overall the story was a waste of my RM8. Not worth your money unless you want to have a good nap in the cinema for 2hrs.

My rating: 3/10

I’m not sure if most Singaporeans have known this or perhaps do know about this but had forgotten about it. The next free money, GST Offset Package, will be released this 1st July 2009.

Yes!! I’m so happy about it. Even though it is not a large amount since my IC is registered in a 4-room HDB flat, any free money is a well appreciated money. Who in their right mind would ever want to give out money to all its citizen every half-yearly? Only Singapore I could ever think of to give out sweets to its citizen in the time of crisis.

Oh yeah the GST Package is only applicable for 21 year old and above SINGAPORE citizens only. If you’re under 21, you can always do a part time work for your cash.

Anyway I’ve attached the dates of the process of the GST Package below. For senior citizens, please do not forget to sign up for your Senior Citizen Bonus along. You will receive an extra $100 although 30% of it will be dumped into your CPF account which I think is reasonable considering that the interest rates are 1% now.

Spend your money wisely!

What are eye creams and why do most women usually use it? Eye creams are usually used to well, get rid of wrinkles. Their main priority is always to get rid of wrinkles.

Wrinkles has always been a terror and a nightmare for most women as it is a symbol or a sign that we are getting older and uglier. Sure, growing older is good in the sense of getting more experience, we become more matured thinking and stuffs like that. But wrinkles! Must they come in along with the growing old package?

Don’t look at me… I’m not vain and don’t mind spotting a few wrinkles myself once I get in the wrinkly age in fact, I’m quite well known to be the person who just uses moisturizer and baby powder has my only make up. I’m not complaining about wrinkles, my friends are.

Whenever I head out to the malls for my normal window shopping therapy, I’d always be amazed by the crowds at the dermatological department stores. All of them were interested in beauty products especially anti-aging and wrinkle free products.

There are some eye creams, best eye cream products, that erases those bad eye bags and puffy red eyes that is usually caused by crying in the previous night apart from just getting rid of the aging lines around the eyes. But if you ask me, the best way to get rid of puffy eyes is to just put an iced spoon onto your eyes for a few minutes, cheap and very simple.

Doors Closing… Too bad one of the doors in the carriage I was in didn’t close as it should have been. I was in the train on June 15th 2009 heading to Pasir Ris around noon when the train became faulty.

The announcement for the train doors closing were repeated a few times and passengers only realised there was something amiss when the train didn’t move after a minute. No one knew the caused of the fault except for those who sat in the same carriage as me.

Apparently one of the doors of the train carriage I was in couldn’t close as ordered. Even after the train operators came and manually turn tried to close the door after turning off the hydraulic pump that had controlled the door.

I have a hunch that the cause of the error was the irresponsible teenage girls that had entered the train when the doors were closing. Their laughters  were heard and their relieved expression were clearly shown on their face when their feet didn’t get caught in between the doors.

In the end, all the passengers of the train had to be ushered out onto the platform to ensure the safety of the passengers before the train headed out to their repair depot. Luckily there was another train that arrived the moment the faulty train left the track.

Door unclosed inside the train

Door unclosed, outside train