FoxTwo's Ramblings

Hancock Is A Good Movie

noreply@blogger.com (FoxTwo) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:28:00 +0000

First off - there will be NO spoilers in this post, so people who haven't watched it won't see things they don't want to see.

I managed to get a couple of free tickets to this movie and thus I caught it tonight, 3 July 2008 (same release day as US, ie 2nd July over there). Initially from the cinematic trailers found everywhere, it seemed to be a story of a downtrodden super hero, played by Will Smith. However, the story is not so straightforward.

Needless to say, I was engrossed throughout the movie and I bet I wouldn't even have to munch on any snacks if I did buy some. The lead character, Hancock, is so named because he has amnesia. He has no memory of how he got his super powers nor his name. He woke up in the hospital and decided to discharge himself, and the nurse at the counter requested for his "John Hancock" before she could release him. A "John Hancock", in US slang, means "signature". It is derived from the famous underwriters, John Hancock, where their signature is proof enough that the item is legit or worth what is written out to be. So, the lead character decided to adopt the name John Hancock for himself.

You can really identify with the super hero lead character because he's an ass, and is hated by people. While he might save people's lives or foil robberies, he does so with total disregard to property, and usually ends up demolishing half the city while trying to bring crooks in. Hancock behaves like this because he is all alone in this world - the only one of his kind.

He does not see himself as a hero, merely a lonely man in this world. He doesn't wear a costume nor a mask. Since he's alone, he has nobody to protect. Thus he has no need of a secret identity. Everyone knows who he is. He the "a**hole" to everybody.

His life changed when he saved the life of an image consultant. The man is so grateful to Hancock that he decides to help Hancock change his public image, and sets about bugging Hancock to be more "heroic" than just being an a**hole with super powers.

As the movie unfolded, there were many funny moments to break the sometimes sombre mood when Hancock is alone and reflecting on his life. I really would not want to bring up any specifics lest it spoils your enjoyment. Needless to say, I find them funny. One example would be his super-hero costume (which you'd have seen in trailers anyway). Just listen to the dialog when the image consultant friend first presented it to Hancock. Personally I find his costume too much like the X-men movie costumes - mostly black with some light coloured trimmings. Not very super-heroic, but cool.

Towards the end, you will find that the story isn't what it seemed. Hancock cleans himself up, and then starts to get the adulation of the general public.

I was a little disappointed not to see Will Smith topless in the movie. Would have loved to look at his rippling body to motivate myself for my workouts. Ah well.

This is a movie where I'll definitely buy the DVD to keep and watch again at a future date.

Oh yes, do stay a bit during the credits. There's a funny scene right in the middle of the rolling credits. Don't just stand up and walk out.

Increase Your Traffic with Scoutle

noreply@blogger.com (FoxTwo) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 09:28:00 +0000

It's starting to become a norm isn't it? Yeah I'm talking about my usual wanderings and stumblings and surfing the net and stuff. I just started with a new company recently and that took time away from blogging.

As an aside - yeah I'm plunging headlog into work. The new place wasn't really what I expected when I went to be interviewed. It was MORE. In other words, better.

Anyway, during my random surfing and stumbling around, I came across yet another Increase-Your-Blog-Traffic website called Scoutle. To describe it, it's similar to Blogrush in that you install a widget and then the traffic is supposed to start coming in.

However, that's where the similarity ends. In Scoutle, you create a robot, a web-crawler called a "scout". You program your scout to start scouring the web and "connect" to sites which you programmed it to. The scout then will trawl the web and hit websites with the widget installed, and "make contact". They call the widget "a stage". The different versions offered at the Scoutle website offers differing levels of traffic when installed, and it's up to you to select the levels of traffic you would want.

I think of this as a sort of "robot social networking" where the bots talk to one another, and then shows the URL and links up in your dashboard on the Scoutle site. What you do is to visit the Scoutle dashboard every couple of days and check up on the new "connections" made, to discover new blogs and interesting websites.

I'm still new in Scoutle, so my connections aren't alot right now. It's been just a couple of days and I can't really tell if Scoutle's worth the hype right now. I will post again a couple of weeks later to see how it goes with Scoutle.

New Home, Day 1

noreply@blogger.com (FoxTwo) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 11:41:00 +0000

Today was sort of a whirlwind. I arrived on the dot, right at the start of the business day. The Human Resource Officer had not arrived yet, so the receptionist suggested I wait in the lobby for her arrival.

About 10 minutes later, a lady brought a huge burly gentleman out to greet me. I was told this is the head honcho, the big cheeze. He's da man! So after a quick round of handshakes, I was brought in to see the rest of the crew. More handshakes, and quick introductions. Then it was down to business.

Within 10 mins, one of the guys said - "Good timing, we got a meeting to get to!" and whisked me away offsite to a high-level pow-wow session with some business partners and vendors, to "give me an overview" of the upcoming project.

It was only 8.45am or so, and I haven't even been processed by the HR yet!

We came back to the office near to lunchtime. Finally I got processed by the HR and was "given back" to the IT department. Since nothing much was going on, my "guardian" (which is a tall American guy) and I proceeded to lunch, and thereafter went shopping for a phone, seeing as he just got into Singapore a couple of days ago and he needed a local number to be contactable.

In the afternoon, a big pile of project documents was placed on my desk and "it would be good" if I went through it so that I have an idea of the scope of the project as well as the work involved. When I say a big pile, I mean big. Easily the size of 3 reams of A4 paper stacked. Needless to say, it wasn't light reading.

What I can say is - the "foreign talents" here in the new place are truly talented. They know exactly what's going on, and what they need to do to "make it work". They don't "throw smoke" and if they don't know something, they will admit they do not know and they'll find out and get back to me. Talking to them is definitely nowhere near frustrating like it was in my previous workplace. The majority of them are from Europe and USA, but we have a couple there that are from China and India.

Towards the end of the day, my laptop arrived. Brand spanking new too, not an old, re-formatted, used one like what most other companies would do.

This was actually one of my better "first day" experiences with a new job and company. It wasn't too boring, aside from the big stack of documents that I had to read through. By the end of the day, I had gone through half anyway, so I guess by tomorrow I'd have a birds-eye-view of the whole thing, and thus, what my role is in the whole thing.

Last Day Of Freedom

noreply@blogger.com (FoxTwo) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 05:47:00 +0000

You know, it feels a little strange.

I have been out of a job for a while. The transition from slavery to free man was easy. However, the reverse I suspect may not be that easy.

Previously I had been pretty productive even when I was out of a job. When I went out of a job in 2005, I actually learnt how to make machinima, as well as Flash and Director. This time around, not productive at all. All I did was just play games all day long. Well in the initial parts of my "freedom" I was actually pretty active in blogging. It was later on that my gaming bug bit me and I kinda got lost in games.

All along, my work life had always been a little weird - all my working locations have always been in far-flung corners of Singapore. Tuas, Woodlands, Changi... you name it, I've been there. My new work location will be, for the first time EVER, be in town. This would probably be the first time I ever needed less than 20 mins to get to work (and home again). I have gotten used to needing an hour or more to go to work - I'd climb on the bus and just sleep till I arrive at the office. The downside to this is that I couldn't meet friends at "6pm in town" for dinner or whatever, because THEY worked in town, I didn't. I needed at least an hour to get from my office to town to meet them.

Well yeah today's the final day I can laze around all day and do nothing in the comfort of my own home. I start a new job tomorrow, and my lazing around will have to be scheduled to start after 6pm.

Have You Gotten Your Firefox 3 Today?

noreply@blogger.com (FoxTwo) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:23:00 +0000

Firefox 3 is released today (US date - 17 June, Singapore date, 18 June since we're 1 day ahead). If you didn't know, Mozilla is trying to set a world record today for the "Most Downloads in 24 hours".

Usually, it is with trepidation that I download a new browser on the actual release day itself. The main reason is the add-ons. I have come to rely on certain extensions and add-ons in Firefox in my daily surfing and other internet activities, and without those, the browser seems.... naked.

So yes, I actually bit the bullet and downloaded Firefox 3 today. It is with some relief that my extensions are 99% intact - only 1 was incompatible, and I can certainly live without it, since I hardly use it. However, the majority of my themes have been disabled. When Firefox 3 started, it was the "default" theme, and I must say, it doesn't look bad either. I could actually like the default theme enough not to go looking for other themes!

As for "faster".. well honestly, I don't really feel it. Feels about same to me, but of course, I do not have any benchmarking tools running to see actual figures. In normal usage it just feels... "normal".

The main feature, if you could call it that, is the new URL bar, dubbed "Awesome bar". You can type the letters as usual and it'll show you the previous URLs you have been to. In addition, now the URL bar offers you suggestions from web page TITLES too!

Now, you can even tag your bookmarks (like how you tag blog posts) and the Awesome Bar can pick up those tags too. So in other words, you now also are able to search via tags too! For people like me who has a massive collection of bookmarks over the years (mine stretches back to 1996), it's going to be quite daunting to go back and re-tag all the bookmarks...

There are other features too, but right now I'm just exploring them. Firefox 3 isn't that much different from Firefox 2 aside from the Awesome Bar, cosmetics wise and functionality wise. I will, of course, need to read the changelog to see what's new, but as it is right now, Firefox 3 just seems a more streamlined version of Firefox 2.

You Are Doomed To Failure, And Here's Why

noreply@blogger.com (FoxTwo) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:45:00 +0000

Image via WikipediaOne of the more common expressions you hear people say is:

"Naw, I'm too old to do that anymore".

... or variants thereof.

You know what? You are never too old. That phrase is used by people who are resistant to change. They are comfortable, they are in their comfort zone. They just don't want to step out and try something new.

For example, for people born in the 40's, during the war, they never knew about computers when they were growing up. Computers in our modern-day incarnations never existed back then. The first time they ever touched a computer would be in their 30's and 40's (late 1970s to early 1980s). They learnt, they coped.

Just because something wasn't experienced in your growing-up years doesn't mean you can never ever do it. I personally never learnt to swim till I was an adult. Even better, I never understood Accounting till I started working, and saw how the numbers moved around inside the computers. It was THEN that I realised how simple Accounting really is. Yet, I flunked that subject in school.

Then there's a variant of the people described above - the defeatists.

"I'm so old, what if I can't do it? What if it fails?"

Dude, you'll never know if you don't try it. So what if it fails? You still learn something - you learnt not to do it that way again. The crap about "if I do something I will do something right, the first time" is just that - crap. If you never tried it you'll never get good at it. It's just a lame excuse to not try something new. They have just defeated themselves without even trying.

That's why there's this other saying - "practice makes perfect". Once you have tried something new and you keep doing it, eventually you're going to get really good at it, since you're conditioning your brain to do this activity constantly, and your brain will store the "pattern" in your memory.

It's sometimes frustrating to talk to people like that. You have an idea, and they shoot you down all the time. "No it won't work". "Nah too troublesome". "You're wasting your time on this". How much negativity can you take?

The ultimate people are those that you present proof, facts and figures, and they still will not trust you. It's like they're telling you "don't confuse me with facts! I know it's been like this for eons and none of your facts and proofs are going to change my beliefs".

Sometimes I think the old saying is true - if you hang around positive people, you'll have a higher chance of succeeding. They won't tell you it can't be done. They can see the potential of your idea or product, and they can see how great it can become if enough work is put into it.

ps - today's entry is not about anybody in particular. Don't speculate. It's just something that has been bugging me for a long time.

Plurk And Twitter, Which Is Better?

noreply@blogger.com (FoxTwo) — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 07:29:00 +0000

Wow it's been a WEEK since I last wrote an entry here. This is my longest "haitus", so far, on my blog since 2005. Sorry guys, Real Life (tm) happened.

To get right to it - recently Twitter had some problems. People who used Twitter heavily were badly affected (withdrawal symptoms, hiak hiak!). For me it was little more than an annoyance that twitter was down.

Then, when Twitter came up in spurts a little later, uniquefrequency from ping.sg had a tweet - he'd found a good replacement to Twitter called Plurk. Since Twitter was, at the time, not stable, I thought I may as well check it out.

First thing that hits you after you sign up on Plurk - the timeline. It's sideways scrolling so it will definitely take some getting used to. Within a few hours of signing up, I had 18 to 20 friends on Plurk and ALL of them are pingsters.

Secondly, replies in Plurk are threaded, like in forums. A little to structured for my liking. When someone replies to a friend's plurk, you get notified, and you have to go hunting for a plurk that might be a few hours old just to see the reply. That means alot of backtracking (and sideways scrolling if you don't click on the "view responses" link at the bottom of your screen).

In any case, this post isn't a "review" on Plurk. It's more like my opinion on which service is "better", in my own context. The initial push to check out Plurk was that Twitter was down. I was impressed that Plurk supports more than just GoogleTalk as the IM of choice. You can choose between the popular ones on Plurk - MSN, Yahoo, GoogleTalk, Jabber, and AIM. All major protocols are covered. Personally, since I use Digsby, it didn't really matter which I chose. The fact that MSN was unavailable in Plurk at the time didn't really bother me much too, even though I would have really preferred to have an MSN IM bot.

However, a couple of days later, the IM bots disappeared. They were offline all the time. This seems eerily the same problem that Twitter had - IM went down. The bots aren't up yet, even today.

When the IM bots went down, Plurk suddenly had none of the perks (to me) to use it over Twitter. No 3rd party clients, no IM, and Plurk definitely doesn't have SMS support. To be "updated", I had to keep the webpage open again, which I hate. Intensely.

Twitter also has the advantage of being "mainstream", so more people use it over Plurk. This is only natural since it's more established. That also means that integration with some other services like Facebook, Mybloglog et al, is already available. Plurk is just a new kid on the block and it will definitely take time for people to come use it, let alone be integrated. Even so it may never overtake Twitter, just like Jaiku and Pownce hasn't, even though they may have been around for almost as long as Twitter has.

If I were to move to a new platform, let alone just to Plurk, I'd have to persuade my friends to do so too. I don't like doing that, since my friends will have their own personal opinions on what they like and do not like. I can gush and enthuse about how great something is (like Digsby), but it's really up to them to take the plunge.

So what's my take?

I have Twitter up all the time on Digsby anyway, so I guess my answer would be - Twitter for me. Plurk is a nice distraction, and I'll still pop in occasionally, but it won't be my "main", so to speak. Also, Twitter isn't "down" now anyway. It works fine, it's up, so no complaints from me.

The Big Hoo-Haa In Ping.sg Recently

noreply@blogger.com (FoxTwo) — Fri, 30 May 2008 05:32:00 +0000

What the heck is happening? I get tied up in my own problems (Google and blogspot.com problems) for a week and something exploded in ping.sg, one of my favourite hangouts.

I read through some posts, notably Endoh's and Krisandro's (and Krisandro's again). It's sad to see things like this actually happening. However, one must bear in mind, it's human nature to have differing opinions. Otherwise there'd be no wars on the planet, and everybody will be living in utopia (or like the Borg in Star Trek, one collective hive mind). Who the protagonists or antagonists are, is actually kind of irrelevant. You don't need to know who they are to resolve the issue at hand, if any.

Personally I have no problems with "shallow" or "deep" posts. I read both types at my whim. If I don't feel like exercising my brains on that particular day, I'd probably read those light-hearted, shallow posts. If I want something deep and meaningful to chew on, I'll read some really though-provoking posts. The only trouble is, thought-provoking posts are hard to come by. Even harder are thought-provoking ones not lashing out at the government or presenting some form of government conspiracy theories. Yeah I'm politically agnostic.

What does that say? To me it means Singaporeans are more concerned with mundane stuff than what makes the universe tick. Besides, some of these bloggers might be doing just the right thing - write shallow stuff to cater to the majority of the audience. It's every blogger's aim to get more readers, is it not? It's kinda like Hollywood, which kept producing those "doomsday movies" at one time back before 2000. Armageddon was a hit, and soon other movies followed in similar vein because audiences at the time were perceived to be hooked on doomsday movies (Day After Tomorrow, The Core etc).

So when a blog post about a topic suddenly gets a lot of hits, other bloggers will jump on the bandwagon to try to get hits too, it's only natural. Just look at the Mas Selamat escape, it's a very good example. Blog after blog kept writing about it so much so that it seemed like the whole Singapore blogosphere was clogged up with just Mas Selamat and his escape. I was sick of seeing "yet another Mas Selamat post" at the time, and didn't bother to read anymore. After all, everyone was just be regurgitating what was given in the official statements. Hardly anyone offered their own opinions.

I was originally going to write about the Phoenix Mars Lander mission in this post, but I guess that's too "deep" for most Singaporeans. After all, Mars is so far away. Success or failure of the mission has no bearing on their cost of living, their salary, their bills and so on. They are detached. If the Pheonix doesn't tell them where to get the next meal, they're not interested. Such is the Singapore mentality. Exploring another planet doesn't excite them. We are now ON ANOTHER PLANET, you see? We're not on Earth anymore. Do Singaporeans care? Hardly. Did life exist on Mars at one time? Singaporeans don't care.

All I can say is - don't dwell on this. Life goes on. The people who do not like shallow posts won't read them. People will not write "deep" stuff if there isn't an audience (or perceived to be no audience) for them. It's just the law of economics at work here.

If I ever get disillusioned like some people already have, I'll leave on my own, and I doubt anyone will miss me and my little blog here. For now though, I'm staying.

If You Want To Make Money Online....

noreply@blogger.com (FoxTwo) — Tue, 27 May 2008 08:02:00 +0000

.... you really, REALLY have to look at this link. Without reading that link, you will be wondering why you failed in your attempts, or why your efforts are not bearing fruit. That link will be an eye-opener if you never knew those before. Trust me.

Don't worry it's safe to click on the link. You can examine the link yourself - it's not an affiliate link, no hidden gotchas to make you click so I earn money off your click. :)

I know you've heard it all before. Making money online is fast. If you have a blog you can make money easily. You can live off the income you generate online. The link above will tell you THE TRUTH.

I mean, who wouldn't be persuaded, especially if you keep seeing these being said time and time again? Every Make-Money-Online blog or website you come across will always definitely tell you the same thing - it's easy, you don't need much skills at designing web pages, it's automatic and so on.

Like everyone else, I *have* been tempted before. I even broke out my credit card on a couple of times. However, it's always at the last minute that reason reared its head and I kept my card, and navigated away from those pages.

Nowadays there are some of those sites that vary those motto slightly. They will tell you it's not that easy, and that you need to put some work in. Well they're only toning it down and telling you something a little less untrue.

The bottom line - most of these sites are commonly referred to as "scam sites". As the old adage goes - "If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is".

Incidentally, this goes for those "warning" emails you get from friends too.. you know, about a new fantastic virus that can infect everything. It sounds so fantastic, that it's impossible to be true. But, that's another topic.

Don't say I didn't warn you! :)

Death To The Google Sorry Page!

noreply@blogger.com (FoxTwo) — Sun, 25 May 2008 08:57:00 +0000

Some of you might have noticed I kind of "disappeared" recently. Hardly around, and even my Entrecard activity was severely curtailed. The reason? I was busy migrating 2 of my blogs out from Google's Blogspot.com servers onto my own.

In the early part of the week, I was cut off by Google from accessing 2 of my blogs. I kept getting the damned "Google Sorry Page". At first, like everyone else, we thought it was a temporary problem. Common ways to resolve the "Sorry Page" problem was to use a different browser, clearing cookies, clearing cache, etc. However, it seems that this time Google has it in for us. All these measures did not work. I even made sure to disconnect from Starhub and reconnect with a new IP address. Same thing, no go. Google still showed the "Sorry Page".

Ok before we go further, this is the "Sorry Page" I'm talking about:

Yeah it was driving me nuts since I couldn't access my blog to do maintenance or reply comments. I kept hoping it would be a temporary problem and it would go away. It never did. Even up to today, I still see people twittering about this. A very good example is shown below:

All my blogs were hit except this one. The only difference? This one's self-hosted, ie not stored on Google's free blogspot.com servers.

It was VERY fortunate though, that the 2 blogs that were hit, had already had the default Blogger commenting system replaced with the more powerful Intense Debate and Disqus ones. Thus, I could still reply to their comments via email. In the case of Disqus-powered commenting system, I could even head to the Disqus website and reply to the comments from there if I wanted to.

So I set about converting my blogs from the nifty Layouts format to Blogger Classic templates, so that I can publish them to my own server, away from Google's reach. I succeeded early on in the week with my fitness blog. I was lucky - I found the same exact template which I used, all ready and waiting to be used as a classic template. That one was fast.

However, there wasn't any classic version of my gaming blog template, so I attempted to manually convert the template by hand into a Blogger Classic template. After 3 failed attempts, I gave up. I have no clue why they failed - the CSS was left mostly intact, yet it looked haywire upon previewing. After having wasted 3 days trying to hand-code the XML template into a HTML one, I gave up and thought seriously about finally moving away from Blogger platform. I was deciding between Drupal and Expression Engine but the theme I used was not available on those platforms. Thus my decision was primarily forced by the need to use the same theme, and to get it working FAST. So Wordpress became de facto platform of choice.

Long story short, it was only today that I completed the migration of my gaming blog to Wordpress. I only used Wordpress due to convenience, not because it's a "all powerful" system. The migration had numerous hiccups, and even their much-vaunted import functions FAILED. Utterly. Wordpress forums were no help. Everyone just said "it SHOULD work!". Yeah it should, but it didn't.

Wordpress was, and still is, very finicky with some themes and javascript not playing nice together, so even though you might like a theme, you can't use it because of some javascripts that you're running. Even worse, some themes look fine on one browser but sucky on another. I know Wordpress die hard supporters will not like me saying this but it's true - Wordpress is almost as good (or "bad") as Blogger.com. The only difference is that Wordpress runs on a server out of Google's reach, which solves my current problem.

I do not have a problem with Blogger platform, just Google blocking me from accessing my blogs. I also do not have have a problem with Wordpress as a blogging platform, just the Wordpress fanbois. I can use either, and I am happy to say that I like (or hate) both equally. None is "superior" to the other in my opinion and usage. No wait, I take it back. Blogger has an edge - I can write 3 blogs from one Dashboard even if the blogs are all self-hosted and externally published. With self-hosted Wordpress, 1 blog per installation please, thank you (without using WPMU and having to muck around with Apache settings and such).

So, now that I've finished addressing my more immediate concerns, ie getting the blogs OUT from blogspot.com servers and onto my own, I can slowly concentrate on perhaps, migrating them completely out from Blogger and onto other platforms. Perhaps I will revisit Drupal, or try out Chyrp. One thing's for sure - the CMS system that I pick to migrate THIS blog to, will need to have this theme readily available and useable.

Now, with Intense Debate or Disqus as my choice of a commenting system, I wouldn't even mind trying out other CMS systems and see if they would be a better, or at least, more interesting choice, than Wordpress. After all, ID or Disqus can be used with any sort of web site, even if commenting systems were not originally available on them!

The Forbidden Kingdom (功夫之王)

noreply@blogger.com (FoxTwo) — Tue, 20 May 2008 07:39:00 +0000

I know I'm late, but hey, better late than never eh?

In all honesty, I watched this movie three times. Seriously, who can get enough of Jacky Chan and Jet Li? But first, a warning. This blog entry WILL contain spoilers, so if you have not seen the movie, feel free to skip the rest of the entry.

Before we delve into my ramblings on this movie, here's a couple of links by other bloggers who have seen it before me. Well at least, did a writeup of this before I did anyway.

Xinyun's thoughts
Darth Grevious' thoughts (well it's mixed in with other movie reviews)

Well the movie opened pretty spectacularly with a shot of the Monkey God (孙悟空) putting the smack down on the Jade Army high atop a mountain somewhere. The move calls him the "Monkey King", which technically isn't wrong, since he *IS* the king of monkeys in the Chinese folklore.

The story is nothing short of fantastic - a modern-day American boy, by some sheer twist of fate, is transported back into Ancient China (中国, or literally translated, "Middle Kingdom") after he came into contact with a magic staff (more accurately, a bo) amidst a botched robbery attempt in a pawnshop in Chinatown. This is the staff of the Monkey God.

In Ancient China, he is very quickly mixed up in a village being attacked by the Jade Army, and as he flees them, he runs into Jacky Chan. The thing that really caught my attention was that the very first fight scene had Jacky Chan using the Drunken Fist (醉拳) to fight off the Jade soldiers. That is almost like an in-joke, since Jacky Chan's first movie was indeed, "Drunken Fist". So Jacky Chan saves the boy and tells him the story of how the Jade Warlord had tricked the Monkey God and imprisoned him in stone, and the staff was the only way to free him.

Then later on in the tavern, they hooked up with a girl called Golden Sparrow. Now this is my first gripe. In English they called her Gold Sparrow. In Chinese, her name is Golden Swallow (金燕子). This is confirmed by the spoken Mandarin dialogue later on when the White Haired Witch (白发摩女) was questioning the innkeeper about a "boy and a vagabond". When she was presented with the dart that Golden Sparrow killed the guards with, she muttered (in Mandarin) "Little Swallow.. let's just see how far you can fly.." before the camera cut away. So, she SHOULD have been "Golden Swallow"! But I guess having a name like "swallow" might be misconstrued :)

The fight scene in the abandoned temple was the best scene in the whole movie, in my opinion. Again during this fight scene, I was tickled to see another "in-joke". The fight started off with Drunken Fist again. Then, Jet Li displayed the Praying Mantis (which I believe was in his first movie). After that, Jacky Chan switched to the Tiger Fist, and that was Jacky Chan's second movie. As the fight progressed, the Snake and Crane forms appeared, in actual chronological order to their respective movies!

The American actor, Michael Angarano, seemed a little stiff when doing the fights. I am guessing that he has no training in the martial arts at all, and it was only the constant rehearsals of the fight scenes that saved him.

The scenes where Jacky Chan taught him kung fu were hilarious. Again, it reminds me of his old movies where he was the one at the receiving end of the torture. The Horse Stance was especially nostalgic. Too bad the joss sticks were missing (from under his butt) because in his first movie, Jacky Chan was forced to remain in Horse Stance for 4 hours until the joss sticks ran out. His master also placed cups full of water on both his arms and on his head as punishment.

Unfortunately, the narrative to show the passage of time where they taught him martial arts seemed rushed. In their old movies, you could see Jacky Chan and Jet Li performing heaps of sit ups, push ups and so on while the narrator droned on and on about the philosophy of kung fu.

Special effects wise, it's a pleasant mix of computer CGI and wire-work. I am sure with modern day CGI, they can easily make Jet Li fly among the mountain tops as the Monkey King.

The whole movie had an epic feel to it, and after watching it 3 times, it still doesn't get stale. It was really too bad that Jason didn't get to kiss Golden Sparrow right before she died though. Would have loved to see just how many people would hiss and boo at that scene :)

In my opinion, this is by far the best "period drama" that has come out of Hollywood. Of course I'm being biased, since I grew up on Jacky Chan movies as spoken in the original Cantonese :) It was also too bad that the Hyena style wasn't shown too, but that would have been too cheesy.

Leveraging Entrecard To Get More Traffic

noreply@blogger.com (FoxTwo) — Mon, 19 May 2008 21:02:00 +0000

For some reason I couldn't sleep today, and my eyes popped open at 3am. Yeah dammit, my bodyclock's gonna adjust itself back to USA timezone again!

So anyway, I was a little surprised to see an email coming in via my Entrecard inbox. Well, I've been getting alot of emails from Entrecard because I just put my fitness blog up on Entrecard, so I have been getting advert approval requests. However this is different - this is an email from a real human :)

Well, before I get to the email, let me just say that Entrecard finally added the ability to add multiple blogs to one account! YES FINALLY! Therefore you don't need a separate email for each blog you want to register there now. Seeing this new function, naturally I added my fitness blog. After all I don't need an extra email address now, so it's very convenient. Plus, Entrecard just naturally draws traffic in.

But, to really increase traffic from Entrecard, you need to give it a little "boost". You don't just sit back on your laurels and "watch it happen". To this end, Bogdan Ionescu from Learniacs.com has written a nice little PDF e-book. Click on the picture on the left, or here, to grab the book.

I tried to get it, but apparently the site is now hit by a high load of traffic or something (perhaps trying to grab this free e-book), so it's unavailable to me right now.

However, I'll still be trying to get it. After all, who doesn't need/want more traffic for their blogs? Even if the blog isn't really a money-maker type (like mine).

Update: Ok finally got the book. What I can tell you is, Bogdan writes in a no-nonsense way. Eg - You want this? Do this. No running around in circles telling you stories of when he was a kid and what he did . And did I mention I just added my 3rd blog to Entrecard? Using the tips Bogdan has in his e-book should prove useful and probably will draw traffic in much faster than my original blog did when I first joined Entrecard last year.

We now return you to your regular programming of useless stuff, nonsense and ramblings.

I Went To The Ping.sg Lim Jiu @ Brewerks...

noreply@blogger.com (FoxTwo) — Sun, 18 May 2008 05:08:00 +0000

No seriously, I was there... :)

Yeah I popped by the place about 8pm or so. I thought they'd all be done with dinner by then, but nooooo... they've just started to order their dinner! Geez. I was on my way to a friend's birthday bash, which was near the place they were having the ping.sg gathering thingy, so I just swung by for a bit.

Yeah you'd be surprised at how many turned up. Even 3 or 4 tables joined together into a traditional longhouse table was not enough! Anyway, soon enough, food came for the pingsters.

Now, that was Uzyn's burger thingy which he ordered. It was huge. And I mean huge. Well not as huge as Botak Jones burgers but still, pretty dang huge!

Yeah that's Uzyn's hand trying to grab the burger.

Well anyway, I didn't stay too long as it was time for me to go meet my buddies at a nearby pub for a birthday bash.

So I took a slow walk to the place, which was really really near. Seriously. Soon enough, the party got into full swing and all the whiskeys and sakes started to come out. Yeah that's kinda like the amount of booze we had. It was a nice bash, but nothing unusual.

Yup, we didn't get laid. We did get plastered though. For one thing, I don't even remember what time I reached home. I only knew when I looked at my SMSes and extrapolated the time I should have arrived home from the last-sent SMSes.

Cool Way To Screenshot A Website Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (FoxTwo) — Sat, 17 May 2008 00:06:00 +0000

Back in January, I wrote this entry here, about a web service called Kwout. For those not familiar with it, it's basically a service to screenshot a page and provide ready-made code for you to insert into your blog to show a screenshot.

Now they've come up with a FireFox extension to do the same thing!

You don't have to to go their website to screenshot a website anymore with this extension. Here's how the extension works in Firefox:

You click on the small "k" in your status bar in Firefox. That will pop out the small options box you see in the screenshot.

Then you select the portion you wish to "cut", like as if you're on the actual Kwout website. Once done, you click on "CUT", as usual.

You'll see the final box appear once you've clicked on "CUT". The extra feature here is that you can SAVE the picture to your own computer, or if you click UPLOAD, it'll bring you to the Kwout website for it to be processed and the code generated for you to be put into your blog entry.

Again, in case someone forgets, Kwout is cool because not only does it screenshot a website, the screenshot image contain working links (if you allow)! In other words, if the screenshot has a button labelled "home", and you allowed image mapping, you can click on the "home" button in the screenshot image, and you will be brought to wherever the link points to. Think of it as a "miniwebsite".

Seriously, try it on my previous post. Click on the links in the picture, and you WILL be brought to the bloggers' actual blog entries!

Feedblitz Does More Than Just Email Now

noreply@blogger.com (FoxTwo) — Fri, 16 May 2008 09:58:00 +0000

Anybody who has been blogging for more than a few weeks will have heard of "Feedblitz". If you haven't, then it's time for you to head on over there.

If you don't know what RSS is, in a nutshell it's a consolidation of blog entries in a simplified format, so that you can use a reader to read it instead of visiting every blog you like to read the latest entries. All you need to do is subscribe to the RSS feed and add the RSS URL into your reader, and you can read all your favourite blogs in one place - your reader.

Yeah most blogs have a "subscribe me" button that asks you to enter your email address, and Feedblitz emails the RSS feed to you. Well, at least that was what it USED to do. In the intervening months where I've left Feedblitz alone, I just realised what it can do when I had to reinstall its code on my new blog templates.

Yeah look at the options now - MSN, Yahoo, Twitter. Now you can get the whole RSS thing beeped to you wherever you are!

I just can't imagine how your Twitter will look like if a full blog post comes in via RSS through your Twitter... your followers would probably see a whole bunch of tweets coming from you (assuming you used the public option as shown in the picture).

And if you have subscribed to the feed via your MSN or Yahoo or AIM, Lord help you when you're in the middle of a presentation for your bosses and a new blog post comes in :)

Unite For Human Rights Day

noreply@blogger.com (FoxTwo) — Thu, 15 May 2008 15:39:00 +0000

15 May 2008 is supposed to be "Unite For Human Rights" day, as Blogcatalog puts it. Before we go into anything too "deep" or serious, I request that you view the video below:

Funny? Perhaps. To me it is. In this part of the world, parents beat their kids. The western concept of "sending the kid to the room" has yet to catch on. The way that comedian Russell Peters put it across is hilarious, but it does ring true.

So what does this have to do with "human rights"?

As I see it, "human rights" is a set of rules (or "guidelines" may be the more appropriate term) by a group of people stating what should and should not be done to other human beings. Their "guidelines" stem from their own beliefs. They see that in other parts of the world, people do not behave like they do, hence they declare that the people there have little or no "human rights".

Just like parents beating their kids.

Sending a child to his/her room might work in the US, and it might work in Canada, but it won't work for other places in the world. For one thing, many children in other parts of the world don't have rooms (as Russell Peters put it across so hilariously).

When the pro-democracy movement in 1989 at Tianamen Square in Beijing was crushed brutally by the Chinese government, a huge outcry against "human rights" was heard from the western quarter of the world. Yes it's brutal. Yes it was devastating.

But, if you look at it, it was exactly the traditional way how a Chinese "parent" might approach a rebellious child - whack the guy till he gets some sense into him. The Chinese government was thus, "beating their children" to put them back in line, by sending in the army (the much-feared "cane").

Having the US government (and other governments in the world) imposing sanctions against the Chinese government is akin to your next-door neighbour coming over and telling you that you shouldn't beat your kids. How would you react?

Typically, one would say "Don't teach me how to discipline my child!".

China has won the privilege to host the 2008 Olympics. Here comes the "human rights" organisations of the world trying to tell China how to treat its "children". You think it'd do any good? What will happen is that China will tighten security measures and be even more brutal, since an "outsider" is coming in to "interfere" with domestic affairs.

I'm not even going to touch on the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, which partly happened under the banner of "human rights".

Human Rights, the concept, cannot be forcefully driven across to everyone. There are social norms and traditional barriers to overcome first, before this can be achieved. Education, while a slow process, will eventually change the mindset. However, a large forceful demonstration against a ruling government will almost always result in failure.

Case in point - just try holding a protest in Singapore. Within minutes, you will see a heapload of "ang chia" (Singapore's version of SWAT trucks and riot police) appearing to "maintain order". Human rights? You can talk about it in the lockup.

Last point to note - I am not for or against Human Rights. My point is just that the concept needs to be taught slowly, not driven across forcefully.

Shareaholic - The One Button To Rule Them All

noreply@blogger.com (FoxTwo) — Wed, 14 May 2008 04:17:00 +0000

In recent days, I have been surfing and discovering stuff that make me itch to implement in my blogs, or install into my browser and give it a spin.

For example, I discovered the Intense Debate commenting system and implemented it here. Then a day or so later, I came across a competing commenting system, which also garnered rave reviews, and implemented it on my gaming blog. Well yeah I am still "in the process" of implementing the commenting and forum features to my third blog, and even thinking about using it on my website in general too.

Before we go further, I'd just like to jog your memory a little. When you read blogs, do you notice that a vast majority of them have some sort of "share this" button or link at the end of the entry? Yeah, those that you click or mouseover, and a list of services will be shown, like StumbleUpon, Digg, Twitter etc?

Well today I'll just touch on something similar, and it's available on the browser. It's a FireFox extension, called Shareaholic. and it's your own personal "share this" button on your own browser.

Remember when you first joined StumbleUpon? Yeah they told you that "it is highly recommended" that you install their toolbar. Then, you joined de.licio.us. They told you the same thing - "install our toolbar". You joined Technorati. Although they don't have a toolbar, you can use the many bookmarklets they have there to "bookmark" your faves.

The list goes on. For every of these "social sites" you have yet another toolbar to install, or more bookmarklet codes to put on your browser bar to "share" your favourites.

This is where Shareaholic comes in. This one single add-on will render all those toolbars and bookmarklets useless! Ok I exaggerate, but this can replace all of them in one fell swoop. Well check out the picture below for a better idea:

As usual, click to enlarge if you can't see it clearly.

As you can see, this one single add-on allows you to share the current page you're on with a multitude of services. I personally only picked those I really use. After all I doubt anybody would have an account on each of those services!

Well, is that it? Not quite.

Shareaholic also works very much like StumbleUpon. Well I think of it as "StumbleUpon without stumbling". What do I mean? Well when you click on the icon in your browser, you will see a selection called "Community links". This is where people using Shareaholic have bookmarked stuff and are sharing it across the various services that Shareaholic supports. The stuff they are sharing all appear here (although not really in real-time). The more impressive thing about this is that, you need not necessarily have an account in whatever services those links are bookmarked to - as long as you have the Shareaholic extension you can see every link passing through the system.

Yes indeed, by using this link, I "stumble" upon new stuff, almost exactly like "stumbling" :)

Eat, Drink, And Have Wild Sex!

noreply@blogger.com (FoxTwo) — Mon, 12 May 2008 13:55:00 +0000

.. oh yeah and learn French too!

No, I Don't Need MC. Really!

noreply@blogger.com (FoxTwo) — Mon, 12 May 2008 05:18:00 +0000

You know a guy is REALLY sick when he goes to see a doc and doesn't require MC. After all, not working, no need medical leave :)

Yeah, I got hit by some unknown virus when I went out for 3 hours to Sim Lim on Thursday. I only went out ONCE, and in 3 hours I caught some potent virus and I have no clue how I managed to do it.

So, Friday, Saturday and Sunday were spent mostly unconscious. I popped some tablets and tried to sleep the thing off. For people who have been following my Twitter tweets, they'd know I have been battling fever for 3 straight days.

Finally I couldn't take it anymore and dragged myself off to the doc's. On a Monday morning too. Yeah that's how bad I felt.

As usual, the routine questions. What happened? Where does it hurt. Ok boring stuff.

Final question - "How many days MC you need?"

Me - "None"

The look on the doc's face - priceless. Wish I had taken a pic :)

He was totally floored. Here I was, on a Monday Morning, where the usual crowd see him to get MCs so they can skip work. And here's a guy, in-between jobs, seeing him.

"You must be really sick", he said.

And, he gave me the strong stuff.

Thank you for your kind attention. I'm off to bed.... *yawn*

A New Way To Comment

noreply@blogger.com (FoxTwo) — Sun, 11 May 2008 13:32:00 +0000

I saw the first mention of it here, at Lisa C Writes. Then a few weeks later, I saw another mention of it here, at Bloggerfocus.com. What am I talking about?

It's about a new commenting system for the Blogger.com platform. (edit - oops, it is not just for Blogger platform. It is also available for Wordpress, Typepad etc too). Yes I know, stuff like Haloscan has been around for quite a while. However, this new comment system, called Intense Debate, appears to be much better than plain old Haloscan.

So is this going to work on this blog?

I hope so. I have, like a typical kiasu Singaporean, made backups of my original templates before slotting in the new codes for the new commenting system. I have also decided NOT to retro-fit this "upgrade" to all older entries. That means I won't lose all the old, precious comments that are currently stuck in the (old) Blogger.com system.

It would have been better if I could have made a complete switch - that means, importing everything from Blogger.com into IntenseDebate and then do a one-time complete template overhaul. Since it couldn't be done, I have to be VERY mindful about not "republishing entire blog" from now on inside Blogger.com.

Henceforth, until such time that this system shows itself to be unstable, this blog will be on the new, Intense Debate commenting system!

Facebook Is A Stalker's Paradise

noreply@blogger.com (FoxTwo) — Sat, 10 May 2008 06:02:00 +0000

A comment by Aronil here in one of my recent blog posts reminded me of more horror-stories that are found in Facebook. Strangely enough, again in older social networks, these kind of stuff hardly happens, if ever. But, in Facebook, with all its apps, it seemed to facilitate stalking.

Facebook has this "feature" which all other networks do not have. Or, even if they did, not to this level of detail. The feature I'm talking about is the newsfeed. You know, when you log in, you are given a summary of what your other friends did, like "commenting on a photo" or "joined xyz group", or even "kissed, hugged, punched" someone etc in the various apps.

Again, let me relate a story. Again, I am not directly involved, and names have been changed to protect the guilty and innocent. App names have also been generalised - ie I will not make references to any specific app by name.

Stella is a very friendly and outgoing person. She also has a soft heart, she can't say "NO" because "it will hurt his feelings" type of person. Like everyone else, she installed many apps due to her friends inviting her to do so. One of these apps is a flirting/dating type app. How this app works is to show her picture rather anonymously, and show only her first name without her last name. Also, in this app, there's no direct link to her profile. Thus the only way for potential suitors to communicate is via this app itself.

So Stella got to know a guy through this app. Let's call him David. David was browsing profiles in this app and saw Stella. Thinking she looks hot, he initiated contact. Stella, being the friendly sort, always replies. At first things were cordial. They sort of "clicked", and more info about each other were exchanged. She gave him a link to her Facebook profile, and accepted his friend request.

Then he started to hint at something more.

Stella recognised the hints and started to back off, but yet still always replying, and never making any ambiguous remarks. She even came right out and reminded David that she's married (as shown in her profile) and that she's only looking for FRIENDS, nothing more.

David, being a resourceful kind of guy, some how managed to obtain her email address (never shown on Stella's profile). Let's not speculate how he got the info. The fact is he did. So he started to send her lovey-dovey messages to her personal email as well as doing all the "sexy" and "naughty" poke actions to her on Facebook.

Every time Stella sees those, she gets upset. At first she tried to ignore them, but when she did, David very angrily demanded to know why she was specifically "singling him out" yet she responds to her other male friends. He insisted she respond to his "pokes" and email, and says that he could see, via the newsfeeds, that she got his "pokes", why wasn't she responding? David kept harping on one point - if she wasn't interested in him, why did she tell him her profile address and accept his friend?

Stella was in a quandry - she confided in her friends, not knowing what to do as it was stressing her out. She didn't want her husband finding out, or else he would think she had been flirting with guys on Facebook (which she didn't). Her friends advised her to totally block David on Facebook, and to set up a filter in her email to automatically delete anything from David's email address.

Stella, the soft hearted girl, didn't want to do any of those. She didn't want to "hurt his feelings". Yet, she's the one being traumatised. Also, in a way, she was afraid of what David will do.

As of right now, this situation with Stella isn't resolved. She now avoids Facebook like a plague. She is afraid to open her email. In a sense, Stella the friendly and outgoing girl, became withdrawn and afraid. All because of one guy.

Stella isn't alone in this. I know of at least a couple more female friends who are in a similar situation - unwanted attention from guys, who won't take NO for an answer. They also are soft-hearted and "don't want to hurt his feelings".

Guys - when a girl says NO, it's not a "maybe" ok? Being "determined" makes women afraid of you, not admire you. There's a fine line between "determined" and "harrassing".

Girls - don't be soft-hearted. Block the irritating ones immediately. Once you block, no matter what kind of threats he issued, you won't even see it. Also when you block, the "newsfeed" no longer updates on the guys' end. Set up filters in your email to automatically DELETE email from these stalkers. In other words, cut him off totally.

If you don't, the only one suffering is YOU, not the guy. He's not soft-hearted towards you, why should you be nice to him?

A Lot Of Women Read My Blog...

noreply@blogger.com (FoxTwo) — Fri, 09 May 2008 03:27:00 +0000

After the Alexa ranking fiasco, Izea tried to convince us that their "Realrank" is the way to go. While I still trust Google Analytics more than anything else, let's have a look at their "realrank" and see what it says.

If your blog is on Pay Per Post or you have joined Social Spark, the piece of code they tell you to put into your blog helps them to rank your blog using their own "Realrank". So far, their stats seem ok, no weird flukes like "Nigeria" listed in my stats (for those sensitive to the word "Nigerians" and "Scam", read my post PROPERLY. I have nothing against Nigeria, but I hate the scams. And this post is NOT about Nigerian scams, got it?)

As seen in the picture above, the stats are pretty standard. All counters (except Alexa) say the same thing - majority of my visitors are from Singapore and USA. The percentages vary, but essentially saying the same thing.

The thing about Izea's Realrank code is - I'm curious just how Izea's code manages to differentiate between male and female visitors. Not only am I impressed that they can differentiate between genders, I am even more impressed they can separate them by age!

If I really get 48% female visitors, then dangit I need to change my content slightly to cater for the female population! Perhaps more pink? Talk about lacey lingerie? Latest makeup and fashion maybe? Or how about boy-girl relationships?

If I continue to prattle on about techy geeky stuff like HTML and codes and what-nots, I'm gonna bore them all to tears... So, come on, tell me what you wanna see! :)

Join Facebook, Make Friends! Enemies Thrown In As Bonus!

noreply@blogger.com (FoxTwo) — Thu, 08 May 2008 01:04:00 +0000

Why do you join a social network, such as Facebook? Well I could have used other social networks like Friendster, Orkut etc but right now, Facebook's the "in-thing", and almost everyone has an account.

So back to the subject at hand. Why do YOU join a social network? I bet it's more likely peer pressure. "Everyone has joined, I should too!". Although none of your friends actively "pressured" you, the mere act of them sending an invite to you is already "pressuring".

We all like friends, definitely. But, did you know you can now use Facebook to find new enemies? Yes you can!

Facebook takes the cake in that it's the first social network thing I know of, where you can make enemies really quick. I'm not kidding.

Previous incarnations of social networking sites, like Friendster, only let you add friends. You can't do much except to send each other private and public messages (Facebook calls the public messages "Wall Messages"). If you uploaded pics of yourself, people can write comments on them. That's basically the extent of the "interaction".

So now Facebook comes along, ups the bar by allowing 3rd party applications. All fine and good. Then people who write "apps" need the apps to be competitive. After all, competition is what keeps nature alive, and ever changing. We compete for food, mates, etc. It's natural. So we have apps that buy and sell friends.

This is the fun part. First, let's set a hypothetical background:

On Facebook, Ah Kow has a friend, Ah Mei. He installed this "Buy Your Friend" app and bought Ah Mei because she is his friend. Ah Mei has another male "friend", Ah Gu. Ah Gu doesn't know Ah Kow, but he knows Ah Mei. So he installs the same app, and buys Ah Mei.

So, this is the part where people get too serious and personal.

Ah Kow is not happy that a stranger buys "his" Ah Mei. So Ah Kow buys Ah Mei back from Ah Gu. Ah Gu, however, is a businessman. He finds that Ah Kow is a good candidate for "quick sales". So he buys Ah Mei again, driving her price up. He knows Ah Kow will buy her back and he'll make more money.

But, Ah Kow is totally pissed off that this weirdo Ah Gu keeps buying "his" Ah Mei. Pissed off, he goes to Ah Gu's wall and writes some threatening notes.

Tada! Ah Gu just got a free enemy from a social networking site!

You just gotta love Facebook... enemies are provided too!

Yes, the story I related is actually happening inside Facebook. This post serves to explain my sudden disappearance from all buy/sell apps, because I no longer wish to be asked to decide whose side I'm going to be on, because EVERYBODY TAKES THESE APPS TOO DAMN SERIOUSLY!

Showing Pictures In A Pop Up Web Page Window

noreply@blogger.com (FoxTwo) — Tue, 06 May 2008 08:30:00 +0000

WARNING! Geeky Post Ahead!

Today, for some weird reason, I thought I'd inject some pizazz into my blog. I remembered how some websites had this funky function that is able to pop a picture up in a window INSIDE the web page.

No, it's not the usual javascript prompt or messagebox window. Some people refer to it as a "web 2.0 popup box". What it actually is, is a piece of Javascript code (or several pieces). So, Google being my friend, I went searching for one. Yeah I could probably write one myself but I'm lazy. Besides, why re-invent the wheel when someone else already has done it?

So, Google, my good friend, threw up several links, and I found a website offering the code for FREE, right here.

As a demo, here's a picture of my hamster, Dufus. Click on it to see the javascript in action.

Nice eh?

If, like me, you just want to pop a picture up in a box, the code is very simple. Just add a class='thickbox' into your <a href="...."> part of your link. So the code will look like this:

<a href="http://yoururl.com/images/picture.jpg" class="thickbox"></a>

Well, if you've followed the instructions on the website correctly, you can easily install this script into your own blog/website too. Also, this script is so flexible you can show just about ANYTHING inside a box, not just pictures. Look at the website for demos of how to show websites, text, video or anything that you can hyperlink, inside a box.

Those Irritating Telemarketers

noreply@blogger.com (FoxTwo) — Mon, 05 May 2008 05:11:00 +0000

I was woken up today by a pretty interesting, if not irritating, telemarketer. Lord knows what she's selling, but she prattled on like a machinegun and I swear she never stopped to breathe.... not even once!

You know the type, I'm sure. They never asked if it's a "convenient time" to speak to you. They just ask for your name, then they introduce themselves (nobody ever bothers to remember their names 99% of the time anyway), then they launch into their sales pitch.

From what I can gather (remember, I got woken up by the call), they're peddling some home theatre system do-hickey, and it's supposed to be FREE. Yes, the word "Free" was thrown about very freely in the entire conversation. Remember, she didn't stop to breathe, so that's a lot of "free" words thrown inside.

Then, when she finished her scripted sales pitch, I could finally say "thanks but not interested". The next thing she said was "why? what is the reason? it's free!"

Why? Cuz I'm not interested!

So I asked her back "When you see a dress and then you don't like it, and even if it's free, would you take it?" she said "no". So I said "what's the reason?"

She said "Don't like lor"

My reply - "EXACTLY".

Good thing she gave up. Or else I'd have given her a runaround. After all I'm jobless and I have alot of time to play with people like that hahahah!

Note to all telemarketers out there - PAUSE once in a while. Don't launch into a sales pitch. TALK to the potential customer. Once you start launching into a sales pitch it turns people off almost immediately. As soon as you stop to breathe, the prospect will, 99% of the time, tell you "not interested". Some won't even wait for you to breathe. They'll cut you off mid-sentence.