My Life With IT

Online, it’s pretty easy to turn off people since the words on the screen are emotionless. Nobody really knows what you are saying unless they see and hear. With the rise of Facebook and Twitter, it seems that these two popular media have been taken to be a medium for abuse. Maybe abuse is a strong word to use but it’s really easy how to turn off people from sites or from you such that you have a strong repelling personality.

Steps to annoy people

• Blast out “Come to my site!” on every single site you visit.
• Constantly send the same email every other day to a lot of recipients you have absolutely no relationship with in the first place.
• Place lots of advertisements every other 2 lines.
• Lots of popups every page of your site.
• Keep urging people to visit your site at Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.

The above steps may just be something that will make people puke at the sight of your name. I haven’t tried it since I have no time to do all of those steps. I rather spend my time amusing myself with the actual productivity of learning something useful even if I have no chance at this point in time to use a 3rd language. No, it isn’t related to IT even.

Facebook is such a hot site that even hackers want a piece of the pie. Having been using Facebook for a while, I find that there are people who are very good at maximising the use to promote their sites while I have been just using it for other things. Youtube has a long list of how to make use of Facebook. Check out the videos here.

Personally, I have encountered being added by total strangers just because some of my friends are friends with them. It’s even a higher activity level if there are guys adding females and I have seen a few requests with guys having more than 1000 female profiles added. I wonder if those guys do know of them or they are just collectors. I even had one who is out to snag a girlfriend by constantly sending requests for contacting me on a more personal level than just using Facebook’s messages. My avatar? It’s a cartoonised version that doesn’t look remotely like me either.

ProBlogger has a problem with adding strangers and is now limiting the friends list to just real people he knows or has interest in continuing the contacting. While adding friends seems to be showing off the power of your network, I know that there are some I’ve added without knowing them at a personal level and there are some I added just because I was playing certain games and the larger network in the games applications, I have, I have a faster way to progress up the games faster.

Ultimately, I got tired of playing the games since being games, they tend to be repetitive after a while. The games developers have been hard at work trying to add new features to the games every few months just to keep up with the interest. That said, I know why I didn’t choose my career in the games industry. That will kill my brain cells in just a few months.

There are so many applications in Facebook to help promote websites and one of the application I’m using is called Network Blogs. It’s rather simple and much like Technorati in a way. Just a few conditions for it to showcase your blog posts; there must be more than 5 followers and for more tracking, more than 20 followers for the most frequented followers.

To me, Facebook is a tool. A tool that can be used up to the individual’s imagination. It’s a neutral tool just like the Internet. It’s the humans who choose to do what to use the tools for, like what a knife is being used for.

Apparently, mobile phones these days can’t really last till your contract ends or even longer. My Omnia is screaming overwork ever since I started making full use of the data plan. Opera Mobile 9 gave me problems with logins after a few weeks, so I decided to install Opera Mobile 10 Beta to test it out. It worked beautifully until just a day later that the processor is unable to take the heat, literally.

Omnia keeps hanging or lag terribly. I am at my wits just to use basic functions like Plurk, Twitter, Facebook, Gothere and FourSquare! Just surfing using Opera Mobile 10 Beta only! How can do this to me? In addition, IE for mobile is acceptable. Not that I’m complaining but I like to use the keyboard to hit “Enter” and it does nothing. Neither did Opera Mobile 10 Beta react except appear a cursor.

Since it’s nearly 2 years that Omnia has been with me, I have to find a replacement. Unfortunately, Nexus One and HTC HD2 have 1GHz processor with 512RAM. Looks like it’s still quite some time before processors and RAMs can shrink small enough for mobile phones. To think I thought Nano technology was the hot stuff in 1997.

Therefore, I’m uploading photos via mobile and checking road maps for now. There must be a way to have an easier time using Omnia to surf!

It’s a funny thing that gets really interesting over the years just about copyrights. I remember the huge uproar over being fined just for keeping or was is sharing MP3 songs over the Internet. Quite a number of people were fined with the court supporting certain cases.

I think the person who first came out with MP3 for songs is purely for personal use and the ease of the digital song format got spread fast and furious. Even better than the singers trying their darnest to hold autograph sessions and concerts with their marketing strategies like freebies, etc.

It’s so strange since spreading the songs and movies via the Internet is a lot faster than spreading via the television, billboards, newspapers, special shows interviewing the actors and actresses, and other money spending marketing techniques.

The Internet consists of Twitter, Facebook, Plurk and I don’t know what social media they will come up with in just a year’s time. Things that do need publicity tend to spread faster online than offline. By the time the video or something gets into print, more than a million views may have just hit the video in Youtube.

Recently,there’s this huge case about weddings playing copyrighted songs. Seriously, I am amazed at the ways money can be squeezed out from using the word “Copyright”. I wonder if it’s meant for everything since I don’t remember that word can cover everything. It’s a sad thing that just to play one song, the couple may just get into deeper debt by playing a few songs at their wedding.

From this point forth, will anyone dare to do anything or will there be ways about it? Humans are creative creatures who can come up with wonderful ways just to avoid being prosecuted. That’s where bribery came about since the I don’t know when. We have come a long way from reducing bribery, I hope we don’t have to resort to this stage just to play a few songs at a wedding dinner that’s supposed to be a happy occasion.

It was scary when I discovered that I couldn’t log in to myPHPAdmin just now. The mySQL server was hit by my connections being maxed out. After a few tries I managed to get in only to see that I couldn’t create new databases. I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be that way.

Now that I have managed to login, I’m still puzzled by the max number of connections error. Is it because someone tried to hack the SQL server? How can this happen when I don’t have a high traffic at this site?

I used to be casual about blogging. It was supposed to be a place for me to rant and vent out my frustrations. Over a span of two years, it has changed into something more complex than just typing out what I want to say online.

Advertisements came into place. Followed by being paid for posting some positive only reviews on products and services. Now, we are supposed to disclose that we are being paid to post stuff. Others expect us to post positive only reviews when we attend their functions. These posts are a mandate if we were to attend those functions.

First off, the mandate posts for attending the functions aren’t paid. Even the goodies given aren’t even enough to cover the transport and time spent. Second, posting only positive reviews is too one-sided. It’s like a one way connection to a destination. A read only CD.

Second, all paid per posts aren’t that easy to write; even a 50-word advertisement can take hours just to draft out something decent.

Third, other prominent bloggers have taken blogging to another level, coming out with e-books and even printed books on how to blog. All I thought was blogging was simply just typing out the words and put them into paragraphs and that’s it. However, online text can be difficult to read since it’s more taxing on the eyes.

The internet is unregulated. However, there is a fine line between over-scrutinition and ensuring that it is safe for children/innocent people who believe in the fantastic results of earning tons of money with just some automated online sites.

I never had the chance to source for companies hiring interns. That was many moons back. This time, with the advancement of technology, internship sourcing has become easier with the use of the internet. It was by chance that I found InternSG. A site whereby companies can post their internship positions and students can apply for the positions.

I’m not sure how good it is since schools have fixed dates for the attachment period and most companies prefer to have 3 months of training session before they can access the students in a more accurate manner. Perhaps anyone who has successfully completed an industrial attachment with this site can give some insight on this.

Singapore Internship provide some tips on various topics, from sourcing to foreigners adapting to the culture in Singapore. Now, companies can apply online at the individual Polytechnics or Universities to state their requirements for the internship. The system will then match the requirements and let the employers choose.

It’s amazing that in such a few short years, industrial attachment has gotten more high-tech.

I won’t claim to be an expert on using social media even if I have an account on each of the hot sites like Twitter and Plurk. However, I find it interesting that companies that start to embrace social media have some awkwardness to the usage.

Others have become ingenious in such a way that simply tweeting something, one will earn some money. Much like the idea of reading each email and earn a few cents. I wonder how many emails I have to read in order to earn S$10 if each email were to be calculated by points and converted monthly according to the performance for that month.

Recently, a tweet contest is being held. One only needs to tweet as much as possible in order to win S$10, 000, grand prize. This makes me wonder if that’s the purpose of using Twitter. To tweet to really become a twit or to tweet to promote services or products.

I’ve seen much better use of Twitter to promote products or services that have gone viral. I’ve also seen some using Twitter to help those in need. However, I find it a mystery why one has to tweet so much in order to garner the most tweets (or become a twit) so as to win a prize.

Contests held by bloggers have been rather meaningful; i.e. RT @tweeter_name “Win <insert prize> when you retweet this! Find out more  at <insert URL>”

That would have less impact of annoying the followers. Sometimes, I wonder if some do really know how to use viral social media to good use or simply jumping onto the bandwagon just because others are using it.