Travelling to Bagan Lalang

We’ll be travelling to Bagan Lalang this Saturday for an exciting opportunity to give something back to the environment — planting trees to offset CO2 that we took out from the environment and doing some beach cleanup. We did some estimation of our CO2 footprint (read here) and yes, we should be planting more trees!

Some interesting facts about trees.

• One person causes about 7 to 10 tonnes of carbon dioxide released to the environment in a year.
• On the other hand, one tree removes about one tonne of CO2 over its lifetime.
• So, if we plant at least 7 trees, we would be contributing towards some degree of carbon offset — it will take awfully a long time (a tree’s lifetime?); but that’s still a positive contribution.

The better benefits would be to help do something to prevent further coastal soil erosion in Bagan Lalang. It’s close to our home, and a great place to picnic while enjoying the sunsets. Such a shame as we were told that some man-made irrigation projects are now impacting the flow of the river; dislodging the riverine soil much needed by mangroves — the ecological impacts are certainly disastrous. So, it is really our minute contribution to this place while enjoying the weekend. We did hear many rumours about the beach being dirty, and that the water is murky:  we are easy to please and we are sure to find that special charm of Bagan Lalang beach. Will share some photos soon.

[post-travel notes]

We planted at least 20 seedlings of rhizophora mucolata or Bakau Kurap (malay)!

We also learnt something new about this particular species of asiatic mangrove:

• Rhizophora means “root bearer” in Greek.
• Rhizophora use ultrafiltration at the root level to exclude salt
• Rhizophora is the preferred mangrove wood for firewood and to make charcoal. It produces an even heat and is easy to split for firewood — well, as the MNS staff lamented: the charcoal with best quality is commercially exported out; and the locals would have to make do with the lower grade ones, ‘as usual’ – he said.
• It is used as an astringent and to treat angina, haemorrhaging (extracts from the seedlings in Indochina); diarrhoea (China, Japan): diabetes, dysentery, hematuria. A poultice of the leaves are used to relief armoured fish stings. Old leaves and roots are used during childbirth (Malay). Bark is used to treat blood in the urine (Burma).

The beach cleaning was another excursion — it provided us an afternoon view of the beach with the tide’s out; and the recently opened Goldcoast resort (very impressive, we certainly want to check this out in future).

The beach was absolutely not as bad as we initially thought would be: in fact, probably better than one of the beaches in Bali when the tide’s out — the exposed seabed was clean; and not filled with dying vegetations and muddy spots as we saw in Bali. Of course, the water here is not as clear.

Bagan Lalang beach is something worth to go back to —  we heard that the sunset here is stunning; the rambutans, durians & dragonfruits are everywhere, the seafood is tasty and fresh: hmmm… this could be a place to drag that unused tent out from our storeroom for a little Saturday afternoon picnic!

Congratulations to Spain and vuvuzelas!

FIFA World Cup 2010

Pudding predicted Spain will win the World Cup, and she was absolutely right (take that Ms Octopussy!). Congratulations to Spain! Well done.

A lot of people will keep whining abour refereing, Suarez, goal-line technologies and so on, but Spain has already set their names in the record book: winning their first cup in their first final ever.

A superb technology was indeed introduced for the first time during this 2010 World Cup too: that’s 3D broadcasting by Sony. It was on Astro channel 830 (see photos), but not having a 3DTV ourselves: it looked as if the tv were split into two and that those vuvuzelas were actually pretty plastic horns!

Other winners:

Uruguay striker Diego Forlan was awarded the Golden Ball as the World Cup’s best player Sunday, and Germany forward Thomas Mueller won the Golden Boot as the tournament’s top scorer with five goals. Spain’s Iker Casillas won the Golden Glove as the top goalkeeper.

So that’s it — the conclusion of 2010 world cup! So now, already looking forward to Brazil 2014 — maybe this time, it’ll be a travel time.

ps: want to watch replays of the world cup without that annoying vuvuzela buzz? Check out this vuvuzela filter.

Travelphotos on mobile phones

Well, ever since we made a post about an iPhone application that rates how good you are in bed with your partner — it seems like mobile phoneness is the way of the future… so, why not? Why dont we make the website mobile-friendly .. it’s the fashion of the day!

Travelphotos viewed on iPhone and Bold 9700

So if you are viewing this site from iPhone or Blackberry, you should be seeing something like the photo here — yes, just captured about 30mins ago on 3GS and Bold9700. Why iPhone? Well.. 57% of mobile users in Asia are using it to browse the web according to techcrunch and Quantcast; even though mobile browsing is only abt 1% of the total web users; yet the growth has been really fast; 148% YOY.

Lets go mobile every body!

You cut already ah?

Cut lah!

Sudah potong kah? You know lah.. cut already? I already cut mine. Feel so good ohh.. Well, certainly! There are many reasons to feel good if you cut it.

Annual fees before cut: RM3165.00
Annual fees after cut: RM1041.00
——————————————-
Savings after cut: RM2124.00 or RM177 per month!

And yes, those are annual credit cards fees after cancelling and cutting them up, throwing them away in pieces. We did have large collection of favorites cards; thankfully without any outstanding balance attached.

You would probably agree with us that if used smartly, credit cards can be our good friends that provide a lot of savings! We’ve actually enjoyed some benefits from these cards especially on cash rebates and discounted pricing with networks of merchants; not mentioning the popular zero interest balance transfers. Unfortunately, the government has a different take on this.

Effective Jan 1 2010, the government has started imposing RM50.00 credit card tax on each principal card and RM25 on each supplementary card. The reasons: governments wants the rakyat to be prudent on credit card spending and that the government is very concerned about the amount of credit card debts — in addition to getting additional sources of tax income (yes, a few hundred millions counts!)

Really? Our take: if the government wants to reduce the credit card debts; they should provide stricter regulations on the min requirement to apply for credit cards rather than taxing the whole lot. How much money are they gonna get from this tax? A lot? maybe not much, but seems like anything that goes in is good during this time.

Our PM did offer something:

“They are getting the RM1,000 tax relief and those paying tax at 27% will now pay 26%. “So, they get two (relief measures) and only have to pay RM50 (per credit card). Don’t tell me they cannot pay RM50?”

Well, not all credit card users are enjoying that tax relief and it’s not RM1000 across the board.  Hmm.. isn’t it that personal income up to RM2500 is not taxable and even if you earn RM1500.00 per month; you can still get credit cards? Btw, an article by SP is rather quite detailed:

Does this RM1000 tax relief really help Malaysians? Lets do some calculations… For example, I have 2 banks’ credit cards (both MasterCard and VISA). (This is very common to all Malaysians, some have even more than 10 principal credit cards). So I need to pay 4 x RM50 credit card service tax, total == RM200. And I am in tax range of 13% which mean that I can only get RM130 back from RM1000 tax relief. In the end, I need to pay RM70 (RM200 – RM130) more back to Malaysia government. So who is benefit from this? Malaysia government or Malaysians?

When we cut up our cards – that has given us another savings of RM450! Certainly, it’s our way of supporting one of the government’s reasons for imposing the credit card tax on the users: to be prudent on credit card spending.

So, which cards would you cut?

Notes for travelphotos

Hey, what’s going on? Just feeling proud right now because we’ve just managed to add “notes” to the photos in our travelphotos section! Try for your self: view one of the images in the album, and click “Add a note” !

Happy weekend, all!

Company spy?

Internet, cell phone while working
By The Associated Press

A few tips for employees regarding Internet and cell phone use:

• Remember that anything you do on a company-issued computer or cell phone – in or out of the office – could be tracked by a boss, the courts or a regulator.Many employers monitor Web site use, keystrokes, instant messages and e-mail. Some even archive text messages on work cell phones.
• Avoid mentioning your company, boss or co-workers in online postings unless you have permission to do so.
• Avoid using any device to take or transmit any company-related photos, videos or other recordings without permission from management.This includes any images of company buildings or logos and embarrassing or unprofessional photos of co-workers or clients.
• Know your company’s policy on social networking, video Web sites, e-mail and other tech-related activities.
• Regularly delete personal e-mail from your work account.
• Remember when searching for a job that many employers check social networking sites, blogs and other online activity.(Source: The e-Policy Handbook, 2nd Edition) – AP

Our say: You can erase your opinion that you are by yourself alone at work! A sruvey way back in 2005 by AMA said that 76% of companies are monitoring the activities if their employees online. So, dont get too paranoid — ample warnings are typically given by the employers.. right? There is no privacy at workplace — we are all in one big pool of flowing info; in a very small pool.

Our beachfront house is for RENT.

We have decided to open for rent our beachfront home in Melinsung Summerbay Resort, located about 30 minutes south of Kota Kinabalu International Airport. Since we are both away, we only offer a minimum rental period of one month. It just doesn’t make sense to us rent it out for  a few days not mentioning the cost of cleaning and time taken to prepare. Longer period of more than 12 months is  preferred.

Oh, and we do want to sell this apartment too.. let us know if you are interested.

• We have two bedrooms, both with airconds. These bedrooms have queen size beds with cabinets c/w blankets/pillows/towels
• We also have one study room with study desk+ cabinet. It can be used as a sleeping room however, bed is not provided.
• The main bedroom has a tub + water heater for shower; the common bath also has water heater shower.
• The living and dining room is equipped with two fans sets; so aircond for this area is not needed.
• Kitchen is equipped with stove + gas + fridge + knives, cooking pots, frying pan, forks+spoons + utensils, cookware sets + rice cooker
• There is also a washing machine with drying area, vacuum cleaner, broom, bucket etc
• More photos at http://zenoed.com/melinsung
• For location of the property, you may refer to the map here.
• To reserve, you may book online HERE

[ view more photos ]

Video of the beach in Melinsung Summer Bay

Video by: olombon

moving on to wordpress

Code is Poetry!

for the past one year, we have been running mobilephotos on serendipity: meaning, we did experience what suit us best.

this was a very hard decision yet today, we moved to wordpress! the main reasons being:

a) the limited themes available for s9y, most probably due to the smaller community and not as widespread as wordpress is.

b) wordpress has a better management of post categories: i can create new tags directly from the post editing page, just by entering them in a text field, separated by commas. anyway — you’ll notice, however that the imported posts from s9y (i used rss import to automate the process) have their categories all mixed up; will probably take the rest of the weekend to fix this and its not due to wordpress but rather the import codes that i hacked from googled rss importer.

c) i like the backend template editing that wordpress offers, and also the cool widgets (although, was pioneered by s9y, so this is not something new to s9y)

moving on … mobilephotos will be using wordpress now, still for a peace of mind (if you dont want to get some code hacking and frequent change of templates, or automated upgrades etc), i do still recommend s9y!

wahhh look ma, no hands!

Ok this is an exception — not our pic but simply a cute picture found while roaming the net. This has to be shared — super cute! Check this out:

Look at that chihuahua — with matching helmet! Lets hope he did buckle up behind (or probably glued to the seat!) btw i should mention that this photo was of charlene y (sp?) of cuteoverload.

Blogged with Flock

Trackback revisited.

No photos this time.

Trackback in my own perspective — so that most would understand what the friggin stuff this is! So I did some reading and this post by Emily on how to use trackback really helps.

For me, a trackback is very much similar to setting a person on a cc list if you are writing an email: you want to let the person in the cc list know that you are talking about them. To do a trackback, instead of using email address in the cc, you will use the Trackback URI instead.

The trackback doesnt need to be in the same blog domain like zenoed.com (why would you?); of course, the whole purpose of trackback is to be able to tell people that you are talking about what they have written; anywhere .. as long as you know the trackback URI (given at the end of this post).

Linking to other websites, which will automatically be called trackback, means several things:

1. It shows appreciation and acknowledgment.

2. It indicates worthiness of the article linked.

3. It’s one way of expressing your reaction to another blogger’s articles.

4. It’s one way of getting comments. If you send trackbacks to other blogs, there’s a great possibility that the blogger will compliment you through commenting to your post.

5. It’s one way of building inbound links. Inbound links are used by search engines to rank web pages. Just as much as it’s a great help to bloggers, it also gives headaches to some. This feature has been a spam vector with some individuals abusing it. A trackback spam can affect the blogger attacked by it. It may “clog up” the server, which may lead to your site’s suspension. Your blog could be regarded as spam, too. It will also significantly affect your search engine rankings.

So how to prevent trackback spam? Try Spam Trackback Validator plugin.

This plugin works in two ways:

• It checks if the IP address of the trackback sender is equal to the IP address of the webserver the trackback URL is referring to and
• It retrieves the web page located at the URL used in the trackback and checks if the page contains a link to your blog.

Other trackback spam blocking methods:

• The WordPress team recommends removing the wp-trackback.php but this might not be a good idea because it blocks all the legitimate trackbacks to your site. You won’t be informed on who links to your site.
• Removing any tagging plugin might work. Blogging platforms, like WordPress features automatic pinging which sends a note to tag services that you’ve updated your blog using your tags. However, removing your tagging plugin is not good for SEO.
• Use other plugin such as Spam Karma which automatically blocks spam bots from entering your blog.

Hope this helps.

On land, at last.

On land, at last.

This was one of the days when flying is a frustating thing to do. The flight on a Malaysia Airlines B737 aircraft departing KLIA for Kuantan (KUA) was delayed for bout one hour from its scheduled flight time of 1710hrs. We departed from KLIA at 1805hrs and soared over KUA airport after about 35 minutes later: only to be told that we would have to wait a few more minutes before the pilot can try to land, through the thick dark cloud, with heavy rain and thunderstorms…

… and 20 minutes later, instead of descending, the Boeing 737 changed its direction and headed back to KLIA after two failed attempts to land. At KLIA, we were told to stay onboard while the plane refuelled: that was an uneasy 1hr 15minutes; before we taxied and flew to the original destination, Kuantan.

9:35pm – we landed at Kuantan Airport, at last. It took us another 30 minutes to reach the hotel to rest for the day.

This picture was taken from the hotel restaurant, during a very late dinner at Hyatt Kuantan. phew!! on land, at last.

do you flock?

just downloaded flock today — it has a tagline that goes something like “a social browser”. in fact, this entry is from flock browser — see if this will go through. [yes it did!]

this is a new broswer based on the firefox code — it supposedly makes blogging easier, photo sharing and other networking stuffs.

our experience: 1st blog post from flockr ended up making 5 repeated entries, so we are still tweaking to find out what did not go well. other than that, if you are used to firefox, there is not much to talk about flock. the url is http://www.flock.com

technorati tags:flock, blogs, software, browser

Follow up: i went to http://stii.za.net/flock/blog1/flockblogging1.htm which is a tutorial on how to blog using flock by stii — the setup was simple and blogging via the browser works charmingly. i have deleted firefox and now on lets flock and froll!