Guy 2: Mr. Anderson….(from the Matrix)

Me: Anderson Cooper! (CNN newsperson)

Girl 1: Pamela Anderson!

Hahaha….really shows the differences between my friends, doesn’t it?

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A few days ago, I was reading someone’s blog, and this person was talking about a new line of nail polish by OPI. I saw the pictures of the nail polish, and I wasn’t too impressed.

Kinda bling, right? The reds are so bright, and the shimmery ones are so…disco-ey. Maybe for a night out, but definitely not for everyday use. And then…I saw the packaging.

Ooohhh, so pretty! OPI has released this new selection in conjunction with the upcoming Alice in Wonderland movie, which is directed by Tim Burton and features Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter! I’m a huge fan of Johnny Depp, and what more when he’s put in a movie together with Tim Burton! So, it definitely made me look twice at OPI’s Alice In Wonderland range.

One thing I’ve discovered about OPI is that they have a real knack for naming their nail polishes. For this round, they are called Absolutely Alice, Mad as a Hatter, Thanks So Muchness! and Off with Her Red. Aren’t the names cute?

So, whilst packaging doesn’t totally influence me (I’m definitely not buying these nail polishes!), they do make people stop for a second…and maybe even third look.

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I signed up to sponsor a child with World Vision Malaysia. The RM50 a month that you send in is not solely used for your child, it is also used to improve the village that your child stays in. For example, it might be used to help build a water system in the village, or build new houses, thereby improving the quality of life for the entire village, not just the child that you sponsor. This has something that I’ve been struggling with for awhile, on and off, but never felt able to commit to it. Recently, though, I realized how blessed I am in so many ways, and how many people there are that will never have as much as I do. If I can spend RM20+ on a lunch with colleagues, why can’t I abstain from a pricey lunch once in awhile and use the money for something better?

I finally felt ready to do it, so I signed up! You’re allowed to choose children living in a few different countries, but I selected the ‘Where the need is greatest’ option. Within a week, I received a mail from World Vision, containing info regarding the child sponsorship, as well as a picture of my child. I was assigned to an 11 month old baby in Indonesia, her father is a fisherman, her mother is unemployed, and she has 2 brothers and 2 sisters. I’m supposed to get periodic updates regarding her progress, but since she’s so young, I’m not expecting anything much! When she’s older, I’ll receive her report cards as well, to show her progress in school.

I feel oddly satisfied, knowing that I’m doing something to help somebody else. Yes, there have been people that asked me, ‘What makes you so sure that your child receives the money?’. Well, firstly, World Vision is a Christian organization. Then they asked, ‘So, because they’re Christians, does it mean that there are no corrupt Christians?’ Yes, I’m sure that there are also corrupt Christians, I’m sure there are corrupt people no matter what religion you are! But World Vision is a long established Christian international organization, if it was a scam, I’m sure that they would’ve been found out by now. World Vision also organizes trips to parts of the world where they provide child sponsorship, and you can actually sign up and visit your child. One of my friends has actually gone on one of these trips before and met the little girl that she sponsors. At the end of the day, it’s your intentions that are the most important thing.

If you’re interested in sponsoring a child, you can visit the World Vision Malaysia website.

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I wish my blog was coming out of hibernation for something happy. I wish my blog was coming out of hibernation for something happy. But instead, the reason my blog’s coming out of hibernation is because I need to express my sorrow at the state of my country.

For those of you who don’t know the background story, quite awhile ago, the Catholic weekly Herald was banned from using the word ‘Allah’ in their publications. The reason given was that it might “confuse” Muslims, and that ‘Allah’ should only be used for the Islamic religion. There was an appeal, and justice was declared (or so we thought), when the High Court declared that the Herald was free to use the world Allah in their publications. An appeal was filed, and the Herald was told not to use the word ‘Allah’ whilst pending the results of the appeal

At midnight, this happened…

A church in Desa Melawati was firebombed! According to some of the newspaper articles, there was an eyewitness who stated that three or four people on motorbikes stopped in front of the church. They broke the glass panels on the ground floor, poured some flammable liquid and set off the fire.

What is happening to our country?? I dare say that it’s only because of a small group of people that they are resorting to these attacks, but it is going to have a huge effect in the already unstable situation.

What makes me even sadder is how our the two ‘official’ online newspaper sites are reporting the news. The news of the firebombing was all over, even on the front page of The Straits Times. On The Star, the only mention of the issue was: “PM has pledged to resolve ‘Allah’ issue”. On the NST, it was even worse: “No stopping protests over ‘Allah’ issue: PM”.

What happened to the peoples’ rights to know? Why should the newspapers only report certain things, and leave out other important issues? As you can see, I’m full of questions, and not many answers. The only thing that is certain is that we all have to pray hard for the country, and wisdom for our leaders so that they will know how to act…

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I watched Star Trek last Saturday at 1Utama, with T, my bro & SIL. None of us are Trekkies, so before the movie started, we were discussing what the tagline for the movie was. Somehow, the phrase ‘To Infinity and Beyond!’ was in my head, and when I told them, they all agreed that it must be the tagline. Hahah, how wrong we were. After awhile, T remarked that that was the tagline for Toy Story! And SIL came up with the correct phrase, which was ‘To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before’. So, obviously you can see that we’re definitely not Trekkies!

I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed the movie! No worries whether you’re a Star Trek fan or not, it was really good. The only Star Trek that I watched previously was a few episodes of The Next Generation, where Patrick Stewart was the captain. It was interesting to link up my memories of the series together with the movie. Parts like “Beam me up, Scottie!” and the character Sulu were floating around in my head as I watched the movie. It got a tiny bit confusing towards the end, when the young Spock and old Spock met. To me, it’s just not possible, because any action that young Spock would take, might affect old Spock. But apparently there’s this whole thing about an alternate reality and the two Spocks are not linked anymore….Anyway, yes, one of the better movies that I’ve watched this year.

After dinner, we were walking around in the new wing, and we noticed some treadmills set up in the middle. Being the Malaysians that we are, we wandered over to see what was happening. There was a treadmill challenge being held, to get into the Malaysian Book of Records. Something about running on the treadmills for 24 hours, or something like that. Hahah, I wasn’t really paying attention. Anyway, the emcee managed to convince T to take part, you get a free 100 plus drink and a nice cert, all for working out for 5 minutes! So, after the required 5 minutes, he walked away with this.

I might have considered taking part if it wasn’t right after our yummy Pasta Zanmai dinner, but then again, maybe not…

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Here’s a recap of some of the most interesting keywords:

• i m here, arent i….
  Well, if by ‘here’, you meant my blog, then yes, you are. Why were you Googling that phrase anyway?? Shouldn’t you know where you are?
• after skytrex. go where?
  We were all pretty hungry by the time we were done with Skytrex, so we went for lunch at Asia Cafe in Subang. How about you?
• example of shu box for maths
  Hmm, honestly, I have to say I have no clue what a shu box is. I Googled it, but it brings up Chinese people in the results. I have a friend named Shuraifa (Shu for short) and I love maths!
• how to set up restaurant
  I haven’t the faintest idea, sorry!
• malaysian mentality nose discharge
  I probably blogged something about how some Malaysians don’t have very clean habits…but I don’t remember using those exact terms.
• things to do with a nerds rope
  Sounds kinky! What’s a nerds rope?
• who does hosseini blame for the plight of women in afganistane in the book thousand splendid suns
  Wow, that’s a truly hard question. I couldn’t begin to imagine what Khaled Hosseini thinks about Afghanistan, I barely knew much about the conditions there until I read the book. It’s a great book, though, if you’re even remotely interested in Afghanistan and the Taliban, read it!

So, there are some of the terms that have brought people to my blog in the past. I always find it a blast to read through Google Analytics if I’m free!

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Do you know what Twitter is? No? Well, according to the website:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

If you’re familiar with Facebook, it’s kind of like how you update your status there. So, in 140 characters or less, you continually “tweet” what you’re up to. According to NY times “It’s one of the fastest-growing phenomena on the Internet.” Personally, I just can’t be bothered! I don’t really want everyone to know what I’m up to, anyway.

However, it is fast gaining popularity. Companies like Starbucks are using it as a means to communicate with their customers. They constantly update their feed with tidbits, answer coffee-related questions, and much more. News portals, even our own New Straits Times is on Twitter! During the Mumbai attacks, journalists were using Twitter to get news out real time, and information was spread really rapidly.

Another phenomenon that I’ve been following for awhile is the emergence of book bloggers. Previously, whenever I wanted to get book recommendations, I’d go to a bookshop and start browsing. That became much more difficult when the bookshops started wrapping up their books in plastic, making it impossible to browse, unless you take the book to the customer service and ask them to unwrap it, which is so troublesome. So then I started checking the bestsellers lists, and reading customer reviews on Amazon. And now, I go to my favourite book blogs! There are lots of book bloggers out there, and they constantly review books. The more popular ones even get advanced copies of books from the authors, and they hold competitions where the winners will get the books. Some methods I’ve seen include:

1. Comment on that post and you get one entry
2. Blog about it on your blog, and link back to the post, and you’ll get five entries
3. “Tweet” it, and you’ll get ten entries

So as you can see, Twitter is really taking off! But not quite so fast in Malaysia as compared to the US, of course…

Anyway, let’s get to the reason that I decided to do a post on Twitter. I was reading the news, and I saw that there was a Twitter competition going on between Ashton Kutcher and CNN’s breaking news team. They’re both racing to get to 1 million followers! I think they both have over 990,000 followers at the moment, so it’s going to be a tight race. The point of this competition? Hmm, I don’t really know, popularity, I suppose?

But it is going to do some good to the world. Ashton Kutcher has pledged that if he wins, he will donate 10,000 mosquito bed nets to charity in honor of World Malaria Day. CNN has also said that they will match the offer. Come on, CNN, you’re a huge corporation, and Ashton Kutcher is but one person…you should be doing more!

Edited to add: And the winner is Ashton Kutcher!

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Anyway, I went to the website to check it out. Well, it’s clean and simple, but that’s OK. Normally application websites should be simple, not overly cluttered with design. On the right, there’s a space for a user login … but no place to sign up as a user. Hmm, that’s strange…who is the login for, then?

You can choose one branch from each hypermarket for comparison purposes, and there’s also a category listing to select which products you want to compare. I selected a few basic products, and here’s my results.

I’m not sure how accurate the results are, it would be interesting to take note of the prices and then go to the hypermarkets to check it out. According to the site, the prices are updated daily. Interesting to note, some of the Tesco items had red plus signs next to them, which states that “Dijamin Tiada Ketandingan”, but upon comparison, it’s the most expensive of all the hypermarkets!

I wonder how useful this site is, will consumers actually use it? For me, I don’t go grocery shopping (unless it’s for the office, or for my own snacks) and I don’t see myself using this portal. The selection of products are the most basic, and the items I would buy are not listed down there. I’m definitely not their target market! It was interesting to take a look at, but I doubt I’d go back for more.

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Of course, me being me, I just only opened the box today, when I’ve actually had it for about two weeks already. I’ve finally worked up the energy to open it and transfer some files out of my notebook. It’s really nifty, the power supply has removable heads, so it fits most of the common electricity outlets around the world. I’ve got three different heads that can be used. It also comes with a three year limited warranty, which hopefully, I’ll never need to utilize, but it’s nice knowing that it’s covered for so long.

Honestly, I don’t have too much to say about it yet, I haven’t even turned it on! I just wanted to post a picture of my new toy whilst I remembered, otherwise it would probably never make it on here. So, I’m off to clean up my laptop which is chock-a-block full at the moment, and to see how well the Maxtor drive works. Ciao! (Oh, and since Monday’s a holiday, I think it’ll be pretty well used by tomorrow!).

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Anyway, it must’ve been fate, because when I went to 1-Utama a few days later, they were having an underwear sale right outside MPH at the new wing. So, I started browsing, and there was a really nice pair which was silky and cost RM60! The promotion was buy a matching bra and get RM30 off the underwear. I didn’t really need a bra, but I thought I might as well try it out. I asked the sales lady for my size, and she looked and me and said, “Hah?? You’re wearing the wrong size! Should take a smaller size.” I told her that’s what I’ve always been wearing, and she reached out and grabbed my bra strap at the back!! And she said, “See, so loose, buy smaller size!”. Talk about an invasion of privacy! At least tell me first if you want to do it.

She whipped out her measuring tape and wrapped it around my chest, and she went, “Hmmm, that’s size XX”. Which was what I told her in the first place!! Then she wrapped it even tighter and said, “Now much better, tighter”. It felt like I would have problems breathing wearing that size all the time. Anyway, she gave me two sizes to try, and I didn’t like either (for one the cup size was way too big, and the other chest size was too big). I didn’t end up buying those as it was kind of expensive, when all I wanted was seamless underwear.

I continued browsing, and there was another section that had Triumph seamless underwear, 2 for RM40! I was a bit confused by the sizes, L70, etc, so I asked another lady what would fit me. She looked at the one I was holding and said, “Oh, that’s large size.” Err, yeah, but would it FIT me?? I thought that I would probably be a medium, so I asked her again, “Do you have medium?”. And she replied, “Got, find some more lah.” Talk about bad customer service! I ended up buying it, plus two other styles of seamless underwear.

I went back home, and tried it out, and the two for RM40 set was super duper comfortable, that I ended up going back yesterday and buying more, just for the sake of owning them. Hahaha, did someone say the recession was coming?

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