ITCOW [L]

At last, I’ve converted. Now a big fan like the millions of others who has done
so too. Well, it may just be short lived since Microsoft has shown time and
again they can take the browser market back after each major release.

For now, everyone and anyone will want a browser that have tab browsing. It’s
like the norm nowadays without having multiple Windows eating up the space on
the task bar or what you call the space in Linux machines (GUI). Yah, there’s
the grouping, not to mention

patented, way in Windows but people like me just don’t like it. It’s slower
to me, in finding the window I want.

Anyway, here’s 2 extension that I cannot do without.

1.

SessionSaver
2. Minimise to Tray

So what’s with Crazy
Browser? It’s good since it uses IE’s core engine but comes with the
capabilities of "SessionSaver" thus till now I have not switch to any other
browser but with the hype going around on Firefox, I just gotta give it a try.
By the way, you’ll need the

Java Update Ver 5 Update 1 to load
DBS
Internet Banking properly in Firefox, old version of Java will work with IE
and that Internet banking page but not in Firefox, update it and it’ll work
fine.

Themes are something people like their browser to be capable of. There’s was
Hotbar for IE but just
didn’t catch up and it seems to put in more spyware anyway, I’ll stay away from
that too. It’s just one of those really "trying" to be very helpful to you
softwares, where without asking you, they’ll love to put in tons of "you might
need it" software when all we wanted was just the main program.

20 Feb 2005

That’s about it, the last straw for me. A pack of Malboro Lights was SDG$9.50
before the speech and it’s SGD$11.00 the next day after the speech. Pall Mall
lights is now SGD$9.50, up from $8.50 So sucker, you must be thinking, what are
you waiting for? Yes, me a male Singaporean 27 years of age, still healthy and
it’s high time for me to quit.

I’ve decided to use itcow.com as my personal blog to track my personal
progress, improvement (I hope) over this peroid of time for me to quit. The plan
is to:

1. Smoke Less for a start
2. Jog more (Been more than 4 months since the last jog of at least 2km)
3. Track my weight, since it’s proven that I’ll eat more when I cut down (and
eventually quit)

Draft of daily input:

1. Stick Smoked
2. KM Jogged

Draft of weekly input:

1. Weight, week ending: XX kg
2. Total stick smoked: XX no. of stick(s)
3. Total cost burnt: SGD$XX.XX

For the record, now, on average, I smoke 25 to up to 40 sticks a day (move
aside Constatine ha!), started when I was around 16 from almost only 3 sticks a
day, see how I “improved”. Now, that’s something no one wants to improved on!

Before all that, I’m thinking of just monitoring myself, to see how the hell
I smoke so much and be more cautious on the time and reason on smoking more as I
do pop 3-4 sticks one after another during certain time. Then, I can do some
personal tracking, adjustments. The goal is of course to quit and not go back
for good unlike a few years back where I quit for almost a year and for stupid
reasons, went at it again for forgotten reasons…

Anyway, for reference, here’s some excerpt of the speech relating to tobacco:

From Budget 2005 speech by PM Lee Hsien Loong from www.channelnewsasia.comPART IV – CARING AND INCLUSIVE SOCIETY Other tax changes Higher excise duty on tobacco Â

4.31 Let me touch briefly on other tax changes. Smoking contributes to nearly
2,500 deaths annually in Singapore. To curb smoking especially among younger
Singaporeans, I have decided to further raise the excise duties on all tobacco
products with effect from today. For instance, excise duty on cigarettes will go
up from $293 per 1,000 sticks to $352 per 1,000 sticks. The new duties for
tobacco products are at Annex C. This rise in duties is expected to increase
revenues by $158 million.
Â

Happy CNY to one and all!

Still updating this version of itcow.com while hosting it from a home server.

By the way, in case you’re interested, this is running off

Red with:

Windows 2003,
apache_2.0.52-win32-x86-no_ssl.msi,
mysql-4.1.9-win32.zip,
php-5.0.3-installer.exe

Red has been revamped quite a bit, from the old
MSI KT3 Ultra2-BR to a
NF7-S, yes taken out from

Green and Green is now running the old P4P800 with a 2.6C and 2 x 256 DDR400
ram and running Windows 2003. Gotta do more learning on that soon with IIS6.

Look out for an article updating

this.

And then it went *poof*

It has been in my brain for some time now and the cause of many migraine attacks on me personally and it isn’t worth the risk of my full time job and most importantly, it’s over, well almost I guess.

I’ve closed down my part time business that I maintain on my own time after I knock off from my full time job.

Here, I’ll share what I call the facts on my personal view:

1. Customer service is important but when you’re bloody asking for help, be kind and you’ll receive kindness in return. Using F* words in your request support mail will not speed things up.

2. Anyone can learn Linux, anyone can purchase or build like me 1 or 2 or heck 100 x 1U server, anyone can co located that server in a data center than claim they have a WORLD CLASS environment housing their server with "state of the art network facilities" but please, so can anyone, anyone can start their own hosting business with generally $1000 and a monthly fee of $100 or less depending what OS you run and what features you want to offer and you can call yourself anything from CEO, co founder, Manager whatever since you’re the only one in the business.
3. I did this for almost 2 years earning at good times 2-2.5k a month on this alone (then how the hell you think I own 6 PCs?), time was always not enough.
4. Yah right, if so good why give up? I hear that tons of times from friends and fellow customers that grew close over this period of time. I wanted to concentrate on my full time job and to further my studies. Morever, the pay now is so much better so why suffer? Going to datacenters when servers goes down, playing with high availabilities setup, trying to get that darn kernel re-compile for new hardware added, reading and buying more books, more migraines. Getting screwed all over via e-mail for downtime. And please, you are paying $3 a month, it ain’t even enough for me to smoke for a day! I can say that but not some big company but they do think the same thing or rather, their employee think the same thing, in this world, the words of "You pay peanuts, you get monkeys" is always true. I had enough for a while.
5. I do have some close friends and customers whom I may not have even met before who are nice though but on the other end of the spectrum, there’s the nasty few, who always mail asking simple questions: How do I backup a mySQL database? How do I setup my POP3/ SMTP? What is FTP? Why need propagation when DNS changes for my domain?

Nevertheless, I have learn the ways of running a home business and there’s so many other ways I have pick up of earning extra cash. I have also learn to be a more patience person and that is something they don’t teach in schools. I feel it is important and lucky that I walk away from this unharm although with many threat os law suits etc but please, you think I’ll start a business with no knowledge of the Law? *wink

Webtemp as they call it. Check it out at

http://www.wassergekuehlt.de/?section=webtemp&page=index&language=english

“What is WebTemp ?

Most modern computers contain many hardware sensors to measure current system
temperatures, voltages and fan speeds. Often many manufacturers install their
own software solutions. But there are alternatives.

WebTemp reads values which have been measured by hardware monitoring tools such
as SpeedFan or Motherboard Monitor (MBM) and processes them. WebTemp displays
this data and creates nice statistics which can be uploaded to any FTP server in
order to remotely monitor you system. “Light” and banner displays are very
popular to be used in hardware community forums as live avatars and signatures.”

Look out for a page of my very own system running Webtemp soon…time to go
figure it all out, celebrate Chinese New Year
and get some rest from work first…

.

A good friend drop a mail on this and I thought it has got to be shared!

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