January 2007 Archives

I've been at work for the past 2 weekends. Just this past Friday, I was given a mission critical task to ensure a buzz worthy product launch and spent an average of 16 hours each day at the office for 5 days in a row. Even so, I've managed to squeeze in a couple of hikes with my weekly hiking club and a birthday dinner with Steve. These diversions were key in helping me to maintain my sanity and optimism.

I stayed up until 4:30 this morning to participate in Simply Hired's beta release of Job-a-matic and I must say I haven't experienced such satisfaction in a long, long while. Matt described it most accurately when he said it reminded him of his college days... only, it wasn't a charade for good grades, which made it even more satisfying.

In fact, I was so happy and excited that when my alarm clock went off at 8:00 AM this morning, I couldn't fall back asleep. I looked terrible from my 3.5 hours of sleep so I didn't go in to the office. Instead I worked from home until I looked up at 6:00 PM and realized I hadn't moved from my spot and managed to skip lunch in the process.

In a bout of Kool-Aid (and apple pie) induced delirium, I even signed up for my own Job-a-matic account.

Now I proudly present to you, my Canadian Expatriates Job Board. Talent seekers may post 30-day job listings to Canadian Expat Jobs for only $5. You too can get a job site for your blog at Job-a-matic!

Oh, how I hate these questionnaires! But since Mike tagged me along with a bunch of people who seldom blog, I'll humour him by revealing five things that my readers don't know about me.

"Once you have been tagged, you have to write a blog entry with 5 facts about yourself. Then choose 5 people you want to tag and list their names. Then leave a comment on their blog letting them know they’ve been tagged."

1. I have koumpounophobia — the fear of buttons. I especially hate ornate buttons that are sewn on. Riveted buttons on jeans are okay, as are simple plastic buttons on dress shirts. However, I cannot stand polo shirts.
2. Although I was born in Canada and lived there for the first 25 years of my life, I have never visited any province outside of Ontario. By contrast, I've visited at least 8 different countries and 10 US states.
3. I find hairy naked male bodies to be repulsive. Hairy backs are especially gross.
4. When I was in grade 1, I used to be a lazy underachiever because my classes didn't challenge me. When I moved to a different city and attended a different school in grade 2, my new teacher taught things that were unknown to me, so I had to try very hard to keep up with my classmates. That was when I became a nerd and developed an obsession for perfection.
5. I have watched Disney's Aladdin over 30 times. It's my favourite Disney movie of all time. At one point, I was able to recite the entire script. Scary.

Pikachu, I choose you!

1. Peter Chang


2. Cabol Chan


3. Patrick Tong


4. Samson Liu


5. Amy Tong

News of Bitpass' imminent demise hit the wires yesterday.

Since it's public news, I can finally share this morbid and distastefully funny photo:

Just for my own reference, this was the lethal tea:

The first project in which i had a tiny role was just released. It's a cool web app that allows you to compose a resume and submit it to multiple job web sites. You can even win an Apple iPhone (or $499 cash if you can't wait until June) for submitting a resume.

It appears that if you try to open an HTML document in Microsoft Word 2003, your CSS will be ignored if you have any elements with multiple classes. I'm not sure about the programmatic reason behind this; maybe Word ignores the fact that class names are space-delimited and takes the entire string inside the class property as a single class name. Who knows, but a work-around for this is to nest your divs and only assign one class per div.

Furthermore, style inheritance doesn't seem to work in Open Office 2.1. If you open an HTML document in Open Office Writer, top level styles will cascade down to their descendants even if you explicitly override the styles of the descendants.

I shower before work every morning, but I don't have time to blow dry my hair, so I leave my hair wet and get ready for work while neglecting this little detail. When I hop into my car, I aim all the air vents at my head and crank up the fan and heat all the way. By the time I arrive at work (it's a 10-minute drive) my hair is 95% dry.

I'm slobbering all over my keyboard over the new Apple iPhone. One feature they seemed to gloss over is the 2.0 MP camera. The only thing keeping me from purchasing a smart phone at this point is the lack of a semi-decent built-in camera. However, if the camera on the iPhone is anything like the built-in iSight camera on the Macbook, I may be satisfied enough to buy one.

There is also no mention of support for external media types. It would be nice if I could pop in an SD card from a digital camera to view my photos on the spot, unload photos from my camera onto the phone's ample 8 GB of storage (so I can take more pictures on my camera... because 5 MP is better than 2 MP) or something like that.

From what I've heard, Cingular's data plans cost an arm and a leg especially when compared to Sprint's offerings. JM told me last summer that even on an "unlimited data" plan, Cingular will flag you for abuse if you download more than 8 MB (that's megabytes — roughly one and a half songs in MP3 format — not a typo) per month. Hopefully, with the expectation of using the iPhone for multimedia downloads, this is going to change.

Join the world's largest artistic collaboration for charity!

Via DeviantArt:

Five international charities have come together to produce a record breaking piece of global art that will represent all people from around the world. To kick things off they have created a global alliance of the largest online arts communities who are supporting the project, however deviantART have shown their dominance by driving ten times more members to the website that anyone else.

The first goal of The One Million Masterpiece project is to smash the current world record of 25,297 contributors to a single artwork. We think that with the help of the deviantART community we can hit that target by the end of the year – so if you haven’t already done so please get on over there and make your mark!

Joining The One Million Masterpiece is free. Log-on to The One Million Masterpiece site and follow the simple instructions. Anyone wishing to make a donation to the international charities can do so securely through the site.

The One Million Masterpiece aims to create a unique snapshot of our global society, and to sum up its diversity in one single picture It will be the worlds largest ever artistic collaboration, with the final picture being unveiled and exhibited on World Population Day 2007 as a symbol of global unity.

Hope your hangovers aren't too bad this morning. :-)

Here's a photo from last night's New Year's Eve murder mystery game:

My resolutions for this year include finishing at least 1 cosplay costume by Halloween so that I can go to Fanime in 2008, starting up a new comic strip and investing my savings wisely. Some other resolutions were captured on video last night.