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Homer simpson's hair beanie!
Going to make Bumblebee wear it when we watch Simpsons the Movie!!!
Must remember to get some donuts too! wooohoooo!
Why there's no Marge blue hair beanie! DUH!

Chocolate Frog!!

Freda Frog : Hey Freddo, gimme back my dress!!

Hee… Sending this from BigGray (my pocketpc 3G phone) via Three Australia's 3G network. Costs 20 cents to send an email but free to receive emails!! I've set up Gmail to forward to my 3email account and keep a copy also, so I actually have 24 access to my emails on my phone. If I send a lot of emails on my phone, I can even pay $3/month for unlimited emails. Anyway, I'm wasting credits this time because I have excess credits this month that will be wasted if I don't use it up!

Hee… Been spending a lot of time this past weekend getting a central lock system and car alarm into Little Red Riding Hood. The central locking system was the difficult one and took all the time. The alarm is not really functional at the moment, but is useful so that we have a remote lock/unlock feature. Finally, our good old 1991 Holden Nova (rebranded Toyota Corolla) has some niceties closer to the 2007 era… I'm quite proud of this accomplishment, and very glad I got an old car to learn about cars on, and glad to learn more about cars from it all. Paul, a church member and also a bush mechanic helped me greatly…

These are really 'sipeh' funny…My Muarian friends should be very proud…

The Chinese Rap Negaraku

and

Muar Chinese

Technology is supposed to make life easier for people…

But sometimes, it seems like it is such a burden… especially when it is implemented poorly. Microsoft, for better or worse, actually has some of the worst technology implementation.

Use a Windows Mobile device before? You probably know what I mean, whether you like to acknowledge it or not. It takes seconds… like 3-5 seconds to start Notepad to start writing some notes. PalmOS favourites, such as DayNotez, would start in about 10 seconds on my 416MHz Pocket Loox T830 when it would take around 2 seconds on a 16MHz Dragonball PalmOS device such as the Palm IIIxe. More examples? Wireless technology, such as Wifi, Bluetooth, Infrared (IrDA) are all great technologies. How often do Windows Mobile users beam information? Almost never? Why? Because it is so clunky, difficult and just “doesn't work”. Many PalmOS users would happily beam software, information (e.g. class schedules), memos, contacts and the likes all the time… because it just works! Same technology, different implementation. Bluetooth? That's a total joke with Windows Mobile. You cannot send pictures via bluetooth (at least up to Windows Mobile 5 AKU2.0), instead you find the filename via image properties, and then go to File Explorer, look for the filename and then send the file via bluetooth… You couldn't even send files via bluetooth until the more recent WM5 AKU3 or WM6, or get the free TotalCommander file explorer replacement. Worse, you couldn't even send contacts via bluetooth OR receive them if your device uses a Microsoft BT stack (those using Broadcom's stack would do better)!!! What's the use of having bluetooth except to connect to a headset, or for using the Windows Mobile phone to connect to the internet? None of these problems plague the PalmOS devices. None even plagued the lousiest of simple mobile phones — not even the LG U300, ultra-cheap 3G phone that we got for free…

If you are out in the market and looking to buy a mobile phone, I would personally recommend getting something that doesn't use Windows Mobile. Otherwise, even with the best 3rd party software, it is still clunky to view streaming video (some HTC/Dopod ones do have the software to support it), clunky to take pictures and send mms (the mms software is not from Microsoft — the phone manufacturer has to license one to include! Some of them do not even auto-resize the huge 2MP or 3MP pictures you can take with the phone), clunky to set up for everyday bluetooth use…

After 1 month of using the Palm, I enjoyed a PDA enough to buy my second Palm after breaking the screen of the first (which I got for free for signing up for a CitiFI bank account). After almost 2 years of using a Windows Mobile device, I am still often irritated and wish there was a PalmOS 3G phone available (with wifi, bluetooth and gps if possible!)… Colafish seems to agree… if there is a 3G PalmOS Phone, she would prefer it over any super-featured Windows Mobile phone…

We decided to go visit the Art Gallery in Adelaide to see the Egyptian exhibition they had in June… and on the way there, what did we see?

Well, a huge, lawn-sized chess set! It was fun… and it's great to see little kids playing everywhere… It seems like Adelaide is a up-and-coming, thriving city! At least, the house prices are increasing faster than any other places in Australia.

We decided to be literate people, and dropped by our nearby library…

Wow! It has free wifi, computers with internet connection, and lots and lots of dvd's!

We started watching the MacGyver series… Hee. And we also borrowed a Spanish CD. Maybe, just maybe, someday we can sing of our love for God and each other in Spanish. Hahaha. More poetic freedom…

He amputated the roses from stems,
and engineered some romance…

From wikipedia :

“A bolster (etymology: Middle English, derived from Old English, and before that the Germanic word bulgstraz) is a long narrow pillow or cushion. In western countries, it is usually used at the head of bed, and is often employed as a head or back support. However in southeast Asian countries, in particular Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand, a bolster is a tubular pillow which one hugs when sleeping. Usually the hands grab the top of the bolster while the legs will wrap around its lower end.

In many Chinese and Malay families, children are provided with a bolster and the habit of sleeping with a bolster carries over into adulthood. It is said that hugging a bolster will calm one's mind when sleeping, and, in the hot tropical climate of Singapore and Malaysia, it is often too hot to cover oneself with a blanket when sleeping, especially in a non-air-conditioned room…”

This explained why i have a hard time finding one here in Adelaide. It was so popular and cheap in Malaysia. Such an essential accessory for a good night sleep. Nothing beats a bolster that smells of dream (hehehe).

I always thought  as a child that bolster has the calming effect because we human evolved from monkey, and monkeys sleep hugging tree branches.. so sleep hugging bolster is a natural instinct… (don't laugh at me, we learnt darwin's evolution theory in chinese primary school!)

Wikipedia has got the adult version of use of bolster.

“Tradition has it that a long time ago, when a married man travelled far for work, his wife would provide him with a bolster made of bamboo to hug at night to help the husband avoid loneliness. This object was called a “bamboo wife” or a “Dutch wife” in English. The Japanese name for this object is chikufujin. Later it evolved to its present shape. It is usually filled with cotton, down, or fibre.”

And i always have thought men don't need pillows to sleep.

We finally found body pillow (equivalent to bolster, albeit squarish) in BigW's sales catalogue after searching high and low. We rushed to the shop and grabbed 1.:)

( No, it didn't come with the flower.:P)

Well, colafish's computer just got infected with multiple trojans… I'm still not sure how. A gentle reminder to everyone to be cautious about your computer use…

Colafish was surfing one day and decided to disable the firewall (http://www.comodo.com, excellent firewall) because she accidentally denied firefox (http://www.mozilla.org) access to the internet… The next day, she found that internet explorer kept popping up, which she could deny access using the firewall, so less harm done. And then, AVG Antivirus (http://free.grisoft.com) started to complain that she had Trojan.Downloader.Generic5.QB on her computer. During that time, she accessed her bank account in Malaysia…

When I first looked at the computer, I found that every time I looked up about this Downloader trojan online and linked to a Symantec (Norton Antivirus) page, a new tab will open up in Firefox with advertisements for winantiviruspro — now I'm not sure if they are the ones spreading this trojan, or they are sponsoring them or not, but I have very very low regard for that piece of antivirus software if they use malware to advertise themselves… During the initial sweep, AVG popped up twice more to tell me that it found more downloader trojans… There was also this weird Error Code 5 coming up on start-up, which I later found to be part of the Sys Control Manager provided by NEC for her computer…

I downloaded and scanned the system using AVG anti-rootkit, AVG anti-spyware, AVG antivirus. AVG antivirus found a trojan.downloader.generic4.zqi. The others reported a clean system! I returned the system to colafish until she showed me that AVG was still popping up, and the internet explorer still kept trying to pop-up.

I decided to take it seriously then… I downloaded mwti antivirus (www.mwti.net) because a user reported success. It reported problems with a pmnmmnk.dll in c:\windows\system32. All attempts at removal failed as it is always loaded on start-up. I then made a boot cd with FreeDOS and NTFS4DOS (http://www.freewarefiles.com/program_9_90_11100.html) and proceeded to remove the file. On rebooting the system, I continued to download and reinstall System Control Manager for her, as an infected version could easily act as a keyboard logger (it is used to track if the wifi key has been pressed and display an on-screen status).

I was quite pleased after that, as the system seemed to work normally — except Explorer.exe was attempting to connect to IP 82.98.235.58 and 62.4.84.53 among others. I decided to google these addresses, and I got to this webpage: http://forums.spybot.info/archive/index.php/t-7022.html.

Apparently, lil black is not alone! I followed the posts written there, downloaded VundoFix (http://www.atribune.org/ccount/click.php?id=4) and proceeded to remove a few more dll's and one ini file. You can find more information on Vundo from Symantec, here: http://www.symantec.com/security_response/writeup.jsp?docid=2004-112111-3912-99

Hopefully, lil black is all back to normal now… It's going to colafish's loving embrace :).