It's been a long day travelling down to Muar to visit a supplier. Along the way I hop in to Melaka for some R'n'R to catch a meal and take a break. So looks like this is going to a long day for me coz I'm still sitting in McDonald at Air Keroh having my afternoon break having tried another route from Muar. The usual way to Muar would have been to use the Tangkak entry or the Jasin entry to the North-South Highway. Well it is always good to explore alternative route since I'm not in a rush so looks like I will end up returning home later than expected. Well that's what happens what you try to use a short cut but end taking what you call the scenic route, ie it takes longer then you would thought shorter! No matter I take it as a learning experience especially if I want to learn new routes. Melaka is a little easier to navigate now. Just by following the signage and learning new landmarks. I hope to understand some of the many confusing one way streets. So far only learning how to drive the main popular areas only. I think it should be adequate for now.
Verifying RSS Feed for Digg
Looks like Kevin Rose has added some new features to Digg.com. Digg is now able to pull in RSS feed but of course they want to make sure the RSS feed URL is yours and not anyone's else so this requires verification. In order to verify, I have to paste the verify code and make a post. So this will have to be it!
And once the feed is verified by Digg I should be able to see my post show in my Digg account.
To view some of my diggs, visit digg.com/janleow
I think this should do it!
bda00d0bab944b8093d05b44ff83c952
Happy Mid Autumn Festival
Happy Mid Autumn Festival!
Today is fifteenth on the Chinese Lunar Calendar. This is when the Chinese celebrate the Mid Autumn Festival with lanterns at night and of course eating mooncakes and such. Just yesterday met up with a client and said today was a big holiday and they would be having an off day and I was scratching my head when I checked the regular calendar and there wasn't a public holiday in Malaysia till he mentioned the Chinese Lunar Calendar. Well not all Chinese celebrate it especially if our Chinese tradition is not well grounded during our school years.
Typically in Malaysia we seem to have two sets of Chinese, one that is brought up with the Chinese tradition and customs and follows them and another group like me who tended to follow the Western culture as our parents were English educated during the British colonial rule and thus the Chinese tradition and customs are less grounded in our background. For us, we seldom follow the Chinese holidays too much except the main ones like Chinese New Year. Others are more like a passing note and celebrated because of media blitz that reminds us of such activities are being done.
My wife side on the other, my mother-in-law is rather more traditional and she would follow the various Chinese celebration based on the Lunar calendar including the birthdays based on the Chinese Lunar calendar! So twice a year they will celebrate their birthday, one for the Western based calendar and one for the Chinese Lunar calendar!
Bluehost down time again?
Now this is getting to be to frequent. I'm getting very sporadic website uptime. Something better be done about bluehost down time. Or they might just find I will be one of the many disgruntled user who may just consider migrating to another web hosting company.
Bluehost is down due to power outage
OMG! This is the worst case experience I have with the Bluehost webhosting service I had for years. It is probably unfortunate that Utah in USA had a power blackout. My main website domain has been down for several hours already. Fortunately my website setup is rather complicated as apart from my usual blogging on Wordpress I also setup blogging using Google's Blogger as well as other website like Yola, Bravenet, Google Site, Tumblr for experimentation. So some section of my website is still functioning. Strangely I don't know why the DNS was affected causing my other addon domain in IPserverone to go down as well. Which means all my forwarding email from that server would have ground to a halt!
It's been several hours already and my website on Bluehost is still down. Guess it is going to take longer before getting restored. I found out about Bluehost status from Twitter, so looks like Twitter is quite a good source of quick information. Much faster than news release to be search on Search Engines.
Finally Bluehost also made some announcement in their helpdesk website:
Bluehost should consider setting up some kind of UPS as backup plan. Likewise in Malaysia where we often experience power blackout every once in awhile especially on a hot day where all the air-conditioner would be powered on at full blast, that put quite a strain on the power producers and usually very likely result in a power outage.
For mission critical task and services, a UPS power backup is a must. Hopefully Bluehost should consider implementing such UPS power backup as part of their overall webhosting strategy rather than letting their users in a lurch when such power outages happen.
Looks like I can't do anything to my main blog as well as several of my other website hosted on Bluehost including access to my cpanel control panel till the power outage is resolved in Utah.
[update]
Yes! My site is up and running again! Took a long while, the twitter updates from Bluehost says it is booting up their servers one by one and about 90% is onstream. Soon shall be 100%.
It's been several hours already and my website on Bluehost is still down. Guess it is going to take longer before getting restored. I found out about Bluehost status from Twitter, so looks like Twitter is quite a good source of quick information. Much faster than news release to be search on Search Engines.
Finally Bluehost also made some announcement in their helpdesk website:
helpdesk.bluehost.com
The Bluehost Helpdesk is currently unavailable and will be back soon.
There is a complete power outage effecting one of the Bluehost data centers, expected ETA is roughly 1:00 AM Mountain Standard Time.
Provo Power has requested that we shut down power while the transformer is being replaced. They are allowing us to use UPS power for the phone system. The other data center is unaffected by this outage.
We apologize for any inconvenience.
Bluehost should consider setting up some kind of UPS as backup plan. Likewise in Malaysia where we often experience power blackout every once in awhile especially on a hot day where all the air-conditioner would be powered on at full blast, that put quite a strain on the power producers and usually very likely result in a power outage.
For mission critical task and services, a UPS power backup is a must. Hopefully Bluehost should consider implementing such UPS power backup as part of their overall webhosting strategy rather than letting their users in a lurch when such power outages happen.
Looks like I can't do anything to my main blog as well as several of my other website hosted on Bluehost including access to my cpanel control panel till the power outage is resolved in Utah.
[update]
Yes! My site is up and running again! Took a long while, the twitter updates from Bluehost says it is booting up their servers one by one and about 90% is onstream. Soon shall be 100%.
Baby Play Time
Day by day, baby is getting stronger. Neck muscles are strengthening so less support is required while lifting baby but still need to be careful. Every so often we will place baby on a prone position so he can attempt to lift his head and upper body. His arms are still weak so he can't do it for long, but I noticed for motivation if the TV is on especially with colorful children program he seems to have more incentive to lift his head up!
And boy, does he likes Astro channel 613! I guess the bright colorful and cheerful characters really catch his attention!
And boy, does he likes Astro channel 613! I guess the bright colorful and cheerful characters really catch his attention!
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Funny Boss Day Saying Why You...
Funny boss day saying why you make appointment so late that after meeting over you go home directly. Duh? And what is wrong with that? It is up to customer to determine the time and it is not always you can get earlier appointment all the time. Also in addition is the workaholic culture so inefficient that for the sake of boss imposing their rule they are contributing to the increase carbon footprint of the world. By making the appointment later (which is also sometimes on request by customer) I worked an extra hour in the office which is extra productivity for the company and saves me an extra hour on the commute back to office which contribute to waste of petrol and spewing CO2 to the atmosphere just to show my face and say, "Hey, boss I'm back!" without doing anything else, go back to car and take the hour long drive home. This goes to show what Peter Drucker (quote, "a manager is promoted to a position of incompetancy") says is true all along and it is what is on most employees mind about middle level bosses way of thinking in enforcing policy whether the policy is made up by them or laid down by predecessor or higher up who has a narrow view of things. Duh? Let's see what other funny boss day saying that boss can come up with.
[update 3/1/2013]
Well out with the old, in with the new, and not any better. The old boss passeth the baton over to the new one. Altogether I've experience 4 expat bosses each with their own idiosyncrasies and eccentricities. However I do have a better feeling after each changes with the worst one with the 2nd boss, and now on the 4th with a much likable personality. However, he was still answerable to HQ, so there changes and implementation that were still not much to be desired. Instead of recording the incoming time by one of the staff, we now use a punch in / out timer recorder.
I don't know what's wrong with my HQ who insist on such devices on all staffs. If you were admin and there is overtime pay involve, ok, it makes sense. But if you are doing sales and marketing where your in / out time cannot be measured, the recorder did not make any sense. So for those times you came in late due to appointment, or leave early or not able to punch out as you could not make it back to office, you need to submit application form (preferably before doing it, but how do I know whether I can or cannot make it back to office?). And really, if you have to go outstation on business trip, you can't even punch in/out either, so submit a form too. Thus making more paperwork for everyone concerned.
When they wanted to implement the time recorder, they thought they could make an excuse or a reason to implement it. They thought that without a timer recorder, the insurance company would only pay compensation for during your working hours in the office. But when we informed that the insurance coverage was 24 hours irregardless of where you were, they were dumbfounded. Anyway, HQ already want to implement the time recorder for a very long time. No need to find excuses to slowly break it in to staff. Anyway which way you want to gently break in the time recorder still would not go well with us staff anyway.
For a small branch outfit with so many constraints do make working rather difficult. If the office has many staffs, of course a timer recorder would be required, but it should exclude the sales staff (which I know many companies do not enforce it on their sales staff)
Anyway, just have to live within their rules and bend it where possible otherwise, it would certainly be tough to follow rules to the letter. It was said, "rules were meant to be broken". This was probably one of the situation.
[update 3/1/2013]
Well out with the old, in with the new, and not any better. The old boss passeth the baton over to the new one. Altogether I've experience 4 expat bosses each with their own idiosyncrasies and eccentricities. However I do have a better feeling after each changes with the worst one with the 2nd boss, and now on the 4th with a much likable personality. However, he was still answerable to HQ, so there changes and implementation that were still not much to be desired. Instead of recording the incoming time by one of the staff, we now use a punch in / out timer recorder.
I don't know what's wrong with my HQ who insist on such devices on all staffs. If you were admin and there is overtime pay involve, ok, it makes sense. But if you are doing sales and marketing where your in / out time cannot be measured, the recorder did not make any sense. So for those times you came in late due to appointment, or leave early or not able to punch out as you could not make it back to office, you need to submit application form (preferably before doing it, but how do I know whether I can or cannot make it back to office?). And really, if you have to go outstation on business trip, you can't even punch in/out either, so submit a form too. Thus making more paperwork for everyone concerned.
When they wanted to implement the time recorder, they thought they could make an excuse or a reason to implement it. They thought that without a timer recorder, the insurance company would only pay compensation for during your working hours in the office. But when we informed that the insurance coverage was 24 hours irregardless of where you were, they were dumbfounded. Anyway, HQ already want to implement the time recorder for a very long time. No need to find excuses to slowly break it in to staff. Anyway which way you want to gently break in the time recorder still would not go well with us staff anyway.
For a small branch outfit with so many constraints do make working rather difficult. If the office has many staffs, of course a timer recorder would be required, but it should exclude the sales staff (which I know many companies do not enforce it on their sales staff)
Anyway, just have to live within their rules and bend it where possible otherwise, it would certainly be tough to follow rules to the letter. It was said, "rules were meant to be broken". This was probably one of the situation.
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