#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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