#993: a smoking jacket with a difference!

My mind went off on a tangent recently, sending me down memory lane thinking of the "Smoker" I would attend just about every semester of college down at U of I: my first was as a wide-eyed potential pledge to the Zeta chapter of Alpha Chi Sigma, the rest as a worldly member checking out the potential pledges, LoL!

Why call it a smoker?? Turns out it's an anachronistic term that was all the vogue way back when, from a time when membership was all male, and it was all the trend for such gentlemen to get together and smoke their pipes and cigars while wearing their smoking jackets (more like bathrobes, IMO) -- that's how they socialised.

Glad we've come a long way since then!

I found a nifty update to the smoking jacket concept by a Fiona Carswell:

"This Smoking Jacket has a built-in pair of lungs on the front. As the wearer smokes, the lungs fill up with the exhaled cigarette smoke and begin to gradually darken over time."

Neato! Please make sure to check out Fiona Carswell and her various projects: the mind that spawned this smoking jacket also has produced the malignant mole bikini, blurry eyeglass tray and co-dependent warming gloves, and more!

Happy hump day, y'all!

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#992: the "we've met!" list grows longer!

Last August, I kinda broke out of my shell and did my first bloggers' meet-up, courtesy of Dave (of blogography.com)'s visit to Chicago. As a result of that, I could then draw up a separate "we've met!" blogroll (see sidebar).

Earlier this year, I met up with two Malaysian bloggers:
- Lina, who with three blogs almost rivals me, LoL!
- Chewbies, who blogs at Bubble Tea Conversations
whose names and blogs have finally been added to said blogroll...

And yesterday...

I'm happy to add the following to the list:

• Rita, who blogs at Look it's Megryan's Mom
• Lin, who blogs at Duck and Wheel with String (and now we know the story behind it!)
• Lola, who juggles three blogs: her Diner, her Victory Garden, and the interestingly-named Fire Crotch Rocket

... and the person responsible for the meet-up:

• Patricia, who runs the Communication Exchange and Subjective Soup

So it was just the five of us (plus Kosh, who was at a nearby table pretending not to be listening to us while pretending to study some medical textbook, LoL!), and it was just the right number of people. Yes, I was my usual quiet and listening self, but I don't think that detracted from the conversations. Right, gurls? :D

... I now have 4 more people and 7 more blogs added to the "we've met!" blogroll.

Here's to plenty of new additions in the future!

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#991: Meat Loaf rules :)

Have a good weekend!


see more Funny Graphs

How I have ended up with WAY too many blogs to keep track of, and why things are going to change around here... (#990)

Back in 2004, when i first started blogging, I had no idea how to find other blogs to read if not to hit the "next blog" button at the top left of the blogger navbar.

Then I signed up with Little Neo, a blog directory/exchange thingy by the owner of NeoWorx - you know, the one with the scrolling list of visitors by country? So that worked for a long time; met people like Moxie, Monsoon and Omni; SG and Ron Allan by exploring another blogger's blogrolls; ended up loading up my blogroll. I ended up nixing NeoWorx though - they were having loads (haha) of problems with their widget - because if it, nothing else on my page was loading. So off it went.

In 2006 I participated in the Lost Blogs grassroots marketing campaign, and have continued to follow many of the people I met during this exercise. I also visited many people who left witty comments on these blogs, and thus my blogroll continued to expand...

Then last year I joined the Entrecard community and boy oh boy did I find a whole bunch of new blogs to read!! Sure, I had a lot of forgettable ones that dropped by that I felt obligated to drop back on, but still, barring those, I have found a whole bunch of new blogs I enjoy reading. For the longest time, blogrolling.com was down so I couldn't add any sites, and now that they are up I don't like their new interface and feel, so I have not added any sites, otherwise I think you'll see a blogroll that's perhaps double what you see now!

Then I joined today.com, figuring I might as well get a little $$ back for blogging, without whoring myself out to PayPerPost, and without being responsible for the ads that would appear on the site. Through that community I have also found many thoroughly enjoyable blogs about a whole variety of topics. Putting on my "expat" hat, I have also fostered ties with many bloggers that would otherwise have been lost in the sea of blogs.

There was also a lot of overlap of EC and today.com, and it was good.

Then came Entrecard's decision to all of a sudden to impose paid ads to run on our widgets. Then came today.com's banning of Entrecard. Then they allowed EC but wouldn't pay for traffic from EC. Then EC's credit-buyback looked like it was going to be skewed towards power droppers, and those who didn't accept those paid ads could forget ever getting $$ back for their credits. Then EC changed its forums and people must apply in order to be allowed into the forums, probably because of a lot of disgruntlement over all these changes. Then back at today.com, almost everyone was demoted from Pay-Per-Post to being paid just for traffic. Thing is, what counts as traffic, and the pay rate, has been unclear for ages. This set a whole bunch of today.com bloggers up in arms, voicing their dissatisfaction in forums and of course on their blogs. Then came the culling of the squeaky wheels, the deletion of offending posts, and what essentially amounts to the firing of said dissatisfied bloggers; unfortunately some who had expressed unhappiness but hadn't decided one way or another were also culled. Thus was born the group of Today Exiles, a vocal community now actively dissuading anyone from joining or advertising with today.com.

... and I'm standing back watching all this happen, and I wonder, is it all worth it?

For Entrecard: nope. I have finally decided. I will be pulling out of EC. All three blogs. I have obligations in terms of 4000 credits of "sponsorship" of blog contests - I will make sure I fulfill these first before I leave. So PinayJade, loutianren, and Lola, keep an eye out for emails about this, k? In the meantime, I advertising like crazy, just to get rid of the bulk of my EC credits, screw the credit buyback program.

For today.com: unlike others, I am not up in arms about the recent happenings. Perhaps it's because I am blessed/cursed with the ability to see both sides to a story, and understand what is happening, and why. Perhaps it's because I'm not as invested in my today.com blogs (yes, plural) as others were - I noticed that many of the disaffected were first-time bloggers, I think that makes a big difference. Don't get me wrong, I'm not siding with one group or the other. But for the moment I will be continuing with today.com... I just may not put as much attention on my blogs there - not being paid per post, I don't see why I should slave over getting one post out every day. Working on traffic, then I just need to make sure I up my knowledge in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) so that my posts turn up on front page of searches. Try "Paht Chee" ... or "Malaysia movies"... (without the quotes, even): I'm already there. Yay!

... I'll be posting a little bit more later about how I plan to divide my time/attention among my blogs. My writing persona has suffered tremendously, her creative outlet overlooked and set aside way too often for way too long. She needs time to herself, and fore herself, too.

My apologies for the long, ranting, and ultimately interesting only to me probably, post. Better posts coming next week.

I hope!

:p

... oh, and all those blogs in my blogroll? The ones I threatened to add to Google Reader? I am seriously thinking about culling them all, and starting from scratch. Okay perhaps that's too drastic. I'll think of something. But I will be making some changes around here. I will. I will, I will, I will!!

:p

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#989: bits of books

So over the past few weeks, Kosh and I have been volunteering at an organisation that essentially provides audio versions of textbooks and such, in order to provide people with vision impairment equal access to these educational resources.

So far, our duties have been to check what has been read by other volunteers. Assigned books change every time. As such, I've had the opportunity to listen in on the following books:

1. A textbook on American History. This was the usual book for beginner Checkers to be exposed to the whole checking process. Filled with not just text, but also tables, diagrams, photos with captions, etc, it provided a good example of many of the conventions used by this organisation. Here, I heard a really great reader and wondered if I'd have the nerve to work my way up to Reader, then heard a really awful reader who seemed to have a cold and was really lethargic and listening to him was like pulling teeth, and I said to myself Heck even I can do better than that!.

2. Prisoners of Our Thoughts: Viktor Frankl's Principles for Discovering Meaning in Life and Work. Reminded me of my past life in the corporate world, back when i dealt in change management and organisational behaviour. Also reminded me that while I know in general about Frankl's experience in Auschwitz and other concentration camps and resultant work, I have not actually *read* his work. Putting this and Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning on my way too long to-read list.

3. A textbook on Intercultural Communication. Kinda cool, since I try to have some attempts at comparisons between Malaysia, Switzerland and the USA over at a malaysian abroad; took down some notes, hopefully the little tidbits will germinate into actual posts there! :)

4. Sent For You Yesterday: A novel about the exclusion of the albino Brother in an all black community, written in stream of consciousness style, and read by what sounded like a white elderly lady, was a really weird juxtaposition. Seriously, imagine Betty White reading "Shit man. Worse than that. Night mare. Day mare. Afternoon mare. Every damn time-of-day mare. Whatever you want to call it. That dream had me by the nuts."

5. One of the many Warriors books, about clans of wild cats trying to survive in their forest homes. A Young Adult -- and feline -- version of Watership Down, perhaps? From what I heard, I suppose if I were a young'un today I might be voraciously consuming the three 6-volumed miniseries, but definitely not as a 36 year-old :p

6. House of Dance: Only got to hear the first two chapters. Dying grandfather. Aloof mother who washes windows for a living, and is probably having an affair with her married boss. A daughter in the middle of it all. Meh. Another young adult piece.

I'm looking forward to getting to Read books soon. I'll probably end up inadvertently refreshing my Chemistry knowledge - there's this huge Inorganic Chemistry textbook that's winking at me every time I pass the bookshelves there, LoL!

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#988: I won!

Guess what I got in the mail yesterday??


It was my $5 Starbucks Gift Card I had won by entering a contest organised by Hava, a fellow today.com blogger who has since moved to her own place at Nonfiction Book Review. It was accompanied by a nice little card and note, too :)



Okay, for those who know me, know that I am not a fan of Starbucks, but hey, once in a while I do find myself in one of them places (what to do... no Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in this side of the US!), so it'll come in handy :)

Thanks again, Hava, and all the best in your new digs! If any of you are interested in the stories of a part-time librarian mixed with nonfiction book reviews, do swing on by, k?

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#987: Purple

This week's PhotoHunt theme is PURPLE.

Easy - my yoga mat!


Together with the powder blue one, Kosh and I workout -- less often than we would like -- sometimes to Jillian Michaels, sometimes our own full body limber&stretch routine.

It's been a few days since we last took them off their perch on top of the CD rack, tho ...

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#986: Foody Friday - BBQ Smoked Turkey Wings!

Long-time readers of Life After Work might remember that back when we were still in Urbana, Fridays were BBQ Beef Ribs day. Almost every week, Kosh and I would pig out (haha) on a half-slab each of BBQ beef ribs from Lil Porgy's while watching Babylon5 DVDs.

We have occasionally made trips down to Urbana on Fridays JUST to get us a long longed for dose of said ribs. We'd also buy like three additional portions to bring back with us, to be consumed over the span of a day or two. We also get a jar of the hot sauce, to use sparingly over the span of a year or so.

Yes, it's that good.

At the end of the year, Porgy's would add a seasonal item to the menu - BBQ Turkey Leg, which was also really really good.

Here in Chicago, there are quite a few famous BBQ places, but from what I can tell, they don't do beef ribs. And I don't do pig meat. So never the twain shall we meet, it seems.

So last week, when I saw that Jewel was having a special on turkey legs, I figured what the hey, let's get us one of them legs and see if slathering Porgy's sauce and roasting it in the oven will be some sort of substitute.

We ended up buying one drumstick (it's HUGE!!) and two Turkey Wings - both items being not just turkey, but smoked turkey - already having flavour locked in. The other day, I decided to tackle the wings. It was a challenge to find any cooking instructions online - many seemed to recommend boiling the wings then popping them in the oven for 2 hours?! Seemed waaay too long and too much of a hassle. Then I found this simple recipe that only said to cook them for one hour. Figured I'd "compromise" and go for 1.5 hours.

So I popped the wings into a Pammed tray and roasted them for an hour. Checked with the meat thermometer - they were done! Yikes!! So I slathered on the BBQ sauce and let it roast for another 30mins. Here's how they looked as I double-checked the temperature:
Don't they look just yummy??

Here's how they were served - one each for Kosh and myself. And yes, that sauce in the styrofoam cup? MORE bbq sauce, LMAO!


The aftermath:
Note the lower level of sauce in the cup. And how the plate was essentially wiped clean! The little pile of stuff is just inedible fatty junk.

The BBQ Smoked Turkey Wings experiments was a success! I'm now a lot more confident about tackling that Turkey Leg. If you want more pics from that future kitchen time, drop me a line to tell me, k?

Previously on Foody Friday:
- Broccoli & Sopapia
- Chicken pot pie, Beef&Mac bake, sopapia
- mega-pumpkin bread
- New Year edition
- another pumpkin bread entry
- mega taco puffs

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#985: 20 out of 100 ain't bad?

So this is Post Number 985 for this particular blog, since its start in October 2004... How should I mark #1000? Suggestions welcome!! :)

On another note: Saw this at i hate kit kats a while ago, and decided to try it out. Yes another meme, and another book-related one at that. So sue me! :D

= = =

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions: Copy the list, and put an 'x' after those you have read, count 'em up, compare tallies. This should be easy. Strutting and preening is optional.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen ( )
2. The Lord of the Rings ( ) (I tried - twice!)
   
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte ( )
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (X) (multiple times, only #7 once so far)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee ( )
6. The Bible - ( )
7. Wuthering Heights ( )
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (X)
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman ( )
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens ( )
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (X) (Does the abridged version in school count?)
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy ( )
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller ( )
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare ( )
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier ( )
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien ( )
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk ( )
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger ( )
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (X)
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot ()
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell ( )
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald ( )
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens ()
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy ( )
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (X) (twice)
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh ( )
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky ( )
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck ( )
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (X)
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame ( )
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy ( )
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens ( )
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis ( )
34. Emma - Jane Austen ( )
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen ( )
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis ( ) [and this is separate from #33 why?]
    
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini ( )
38. Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres ( )
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden ( )
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne ( )
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell (X)
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (X)
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ( )
44. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving ( )
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins ( )
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery ( )
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy ()
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood ()
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding ( )
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan ( )
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel (X)
52. Dune - Frank Herbert (X)
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons ( )
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen ( )
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth ( )
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon ( )
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (X) (Again - does the abridged version count?)
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley ( )
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (X)
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ( )
61. Of Mice and Men- John Steinbeck ( )
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov ( )
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt ( )
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (X)
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas( )
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac ( )
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy ( )
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding ( ) (Couldn't get past the second page!)
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie ( )
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville ( )
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (X) (Abridged!! Do you see a pattern here?)
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker (X) (Children's Illustrated version count?)
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett ( )
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson ( )
75. Ulysses - James Joyce ( )
76. The Inferno – Dante ( )
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome ( )
78. Germinal - Emile Zola ( )
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray ( )
80. Possession - AS Byat ( )
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens ( )
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell ( )
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker ( )
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro ( )
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert ( )
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry ()
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White ()
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (X) (I do NOT recommend this insipid read!)
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (X)
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton (X)
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad ( )
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (X)
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks ( )
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams (X)
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole ( )
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute ( )
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (X)
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare ( ) [and this is separate from #14 why?]
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (X)
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (X)
     

So that's 20 for me. How about you?

I have to point out that this list is pretty random - I doubt its origins "from the BBC", and the sloppy entries (Shakespeare and CS Lewis) turn this into a joke.

However, it's amusing for me to look at this list and have absolutely NO desire to even touch many of the works listed. You see, I have this aversion to "classic" "literature": it's a reflexive instinctual reaction developed from childhood, from school, where if you were "good in English" then it was assumed you liked/read classics by Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Shakespeare, etc. I very much preferred fantasy, regular fiction and Stephen King; had no patience for the stuffy classics; and knew I was judged lacking by certain peers and teachers. Me being me, I put on my stone face and thick skin and did my own thing.

Of the 20 I have read above, I think I would recommend The Time-Traveler's Wife: it is an excellent read, just make sure you have a box of tissues with you, especially when nearing the end of the book!

Of the remaining 80 above, Possession by A S Byatt has been on my to-read list for about a year. I first heard about her when taking my Fairy Tales class: she has a short story collection of modern / re-written / new fairy tales that were well-written. She comes across as a very articulate writer, and while I'm not a fan of love stories per se, I am very interested in the description of what this book is about. I also have the movie version somewhere on my Netflix queue - we'll see which I get to first! :)

As usual, feel free to tag yourself! Do drop me a comment with a link to your post if you try this out on your own site, k? I'd love to see your own comments to the list.

Cheers!

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What a sight!

Kosh and I were walking around downtown yesterday evening, and decided to take advantage of one of the free things to do in Chicago: checking out the series of Chinese sculptures recently installed at Millennium Park.

This is the sight that greeted us. ... this piece is supposed to symbolise greed... well, what with the overly-endowed sow, and the glitzy gold, and bright red... it certainly shouts EXCESS to me!

You can see more photos of this and the other sculptures in my flickr photostream.

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overfed?!

Hi All!

This just might happen to me soon:


Over the course of the next few days, I hope to be moving ALL the links from my blogrolls in this sidebar into my Google Reader PLUS lots of newer ones I never did get around to adding to said blogroll. I don't know if this will be a quick endeavour, or whether it'll transform into a monster that sucks me into another dimension of space and time. I don't know whether I can add categories / subfolders into the public "Blogs I Follow" -- I sure hope so, otherwise I really WILL be "overfed" by all those RSS feeds!

Lots of unknowns.

Wish me luck!

btw - liked this cartoon? It's from We Blog Cartoons - check it out!

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rejected!

Wow, I feel like I've been slapped in the face.

I got this email the other day regarding the submission of my a malaysian abroad site to a Malaysia-based blogger's directory:

Dear lynne Naranek,

We are sorry to inform you that we could not approve your blog listed below to [yaddayaddayadda].com.

Blog Title: a malaysian abroad
Blog Owner: lynne Naranek
Blog URL: http://amalaysianabroad.today.com/

This could be but not always true due to the following reasons:

* Too new, less than 5 posts.
* Inactive blog, no update.
* Incomplete submission.
* Submitted link is not a Blog.
* Not a Malaysia Blog (we are [yaddayaddayadda].com).
* Blog contains material that is illegal under Malaysia government law.
* SPAM / Website contents are plagiarism from other websites.

If you think your submission doesn't violate any of the above, please contact us at by replying to this email and we will reconsider your blog submission again.

Thank you!
_______________
Yours sincerely,
Dr. [blah blah blah]
Founder
www.[yaddayaddayadda].com

wtf?

Let's take a closer look at the list of "not always true possible reasons", shall we?

* Too new, less than 5 posts.
... ummm, no.... I have over one hundred posts there!

* Inactive blog, no update.
... see above - that's over one hundred posts and counting!

* Incomplete submission.
... I believe I filled up everything that was asked for, I am usually good about things like that...

* Submitted link is not a Blog.
... ummm, yes it IS a blog

* Not a Malaysia Blog (we are [yaddayaddayadda].com).
... I'm a Malaysian writing about being a Malaysian abroad, what more do you want? I think that's more a "Malaysia Blog" than a few blogs I see in the Travel category I applied for: there many generic travel blogs that might have one article about Malaysia buried in there somewhere - so THOSE are "Malaysia Blogs" and mine isn't?

* Blog contains material that is illegal under Malaysia government law.
... LMAO I make it a point not to discuss politics or take digs at the Malaysian government over there, and I really don't think anything I've said in the over 100 posts has been "illegal under Malaysia government law" in any way!

* SPAM / Website contents are plagiarism from other websites.
... certainly not a spam website, and all content there is original content produced by me for today.com, thank you very much!

... ... so yes, I could write in ask the powers that be to please reconsider ... but I really don't see why I would have been rejected in the first place?!!! So my pride is in major reactive mode right now. Heck, I've been stewing about this for two days.

Rabble rabble rabble.

Your thoughts?

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Photo Hunt: stripe search!

Do you PhotoHunt? I started two weeks ago at a malaysian abroad, with the objective of coupling relevant photos with some sort of commentary related to my theme of observing, comparing and celebrating the differences and similarities between Malaysia, Switzerland, the USA and more!. If you haven't already, do check out my entries for yellow, and hands and tell me what you think, k?

For this week's STRIPES assignment, I ended up with more photo ideas than could be made to fit into my other blog(s), so here's the spillover of sorts :)

... ↑ vertical blinds provide stripes of light ...

... discarded sweaty striped clothes, after the gym ↓ ...

Have a great weekend, everyone!

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1st Quarter Book Review: a pictorial report

I feel I am off to a slow start: can't believe I have only read 11 books so far this year! (Then again, at this time last year I had consumed 10, so I'm not too far off... yet...)

Please click on each image to go to my review of each book:


The most outstanding of all the above? I have to say Twilight. Just because it was such a painful read. I mean, it is SO OBVIOUS that the target audience is angsty hormonal tweenage girls in the exciting world of first love. Yuck! And I really have a problem with the whole sparkly vampire thing. Double Yuck!!

Also, you might notice that there are *gasp!* FIVE nonfiction books in this list, which is amazing considering I usually go for fantasy, high fantasy and dark fantasy before moving to fiction then other genres.

The reason for this is simple: I was doing research for my a saying three ways series over at a malaysian abroad while on vaykay last month. See those three "no image found" ones? Yeah, those. Funny how the locally published books have ISBNs that aren't recognised by GoodReads or amazon...

I am currently reading

Next in line is Yes, only once Kosh and I are done reading this will we consider watching the movie,,, well, let's be honest - we're going to wait to get it from Netflix, LoL!

So tell me, what have you read recently? Anything outstanding? Do share! :)

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Hve you heard about Gmail Autopilot?

Gmail Autopilot is a brand new feature from the folks at Google, to help us with our overflowing mailboxes, by auto-answering them. Check it out! Google Autopilot.


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*wink!* *wink!*

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