sixthseal.com – Page 280 – Leading the wild into the ways of the man…

A stack of postcards from graceshu

November 5, 2003 by HB

I got a stack of postcards from Grace
[pixelphobia.net] today. 🙂 It was all bundled up when I got home and
consisted of a total of 5 postcards rubber banded together. The first
four are McDonald’s postcards, each one having a single letter – FOR,
WHAT, ITS, WORTH. They actually double as a coupon for a free something
with a purchase. The back of the postcards actually fit side by side to
make a large banner with “i’m lovin’ it”!

Don’t worry about it if this all sounds puzzling. “McDonald’s
vouchers” and “i’m lovin’ it” is an insider thing between us. Something
like our private joke, except only the first one is funny and the
second one isn’t. :p Anyway, the 5th postcard is mailed from Cameron
Highlands during her camp:

Front of the postcard.

It reads:

Hi,
Camerons was freaking cold
as it rained all day & night.
Had some freezing & sleepless
nights during the camp. Other
than that, all was fine. They
had pretty good strawberry farms & shortcakes
there too! As usual, ate a lot.
Will write again when am in Ipoh!
Take care!

Grace
24/10/2003

Back of the postcard.

Thanks Grace! 🙂 She’s the greatest, taking time out to mail postcards.

On another note, I have been notified by The People From Above
(otherwise known as TPFA) that updating my weblog during work hours is
unacceptable, even during lunch hour, and while I’m known for being
subversive, I shall accede to this. I can understand how management can
interprete this as a loss of productivity so I will not be updating the
site, replying the comments or even visiting my own blog(s) during
office hours.

However, I will update daily as usual, when I get back from work.
The first person who accuses me of giving in to The Man gets a hefty
kick to the balls (or to the general region for females). 😉

Isabelle’s Chicken Sandwich

November 5, 2003 by HB

Ramuan: Roti segar, sayur segar, cili berempah, bawang, lada hitam, lada sulah, majerin.

Does this look familiar? The packaging is similar to the Mega Chicken Delice
[sixthseal.com] and it appears to be visually indistinguishable. It’s
made by the same company too and it’s at the same price range. However,
Isabelle’s Chicken Sandwich seems to have superceded Mega Chicken
Delice as the latter could not be found anymore. This is a real shame
because the ingredients are different if you look closely.

Isabelle’s Chicken Sandwich does not have cheese, and it doesn’t
have mayo! Sacrilage! It tastes positively bland in comparison with the
Mega Chicken Delight, which will sadly be missed. The new chicken
sandwich is just too dry and bland compared to the previous one. R.I.P.
Mega Chicken Delice.

Thanks ryuu!

November 5, 2003 by HB

I just got your mail with the note and the RM 50 donation passed to
me at my workstation. It’s very much appreciated indeed! 🙂 It would
help with the bandwidth excess charges that’s for sure. ryuu is the
second person ever to donate to sixthseal.com. I didn’t think anyone
actually would but he did. Thanks a lot buddy! 🙂

Anyway, my workload is still very heavy so I’ll have to reply the
comments when I get back home tonight (which would be late), sorry
people, I don’t mean to neglect the feedback, but I have a project due
tomorrow.

[Edit: Link removed upon request.]

i’m lovin’ it

November 4, 2003 by HB

I’m lovin’ it. Don’t you just love the McDonald’s ad campaign that
has replaced the “Makan” (with the golden arches replacing the “M”) one?

I look at the banners and I feel all warm inside.

My apologies for the lack of updates. It’s taking a lot of effort just to post this one.

I’m entering my quarterly serotonin depletion stage aka “I’m depressed. I want to sleep all day.”.

But I look at these banners and think, “Hey! I’m loving it!” and it’s alright again. Oops…I forgot my sarcasm tags. i’m lovin’ it.

New “About me” page

November 1, 2003 by HB

The long due update for the “About me” page has finally been done
today. I’ve not changed it since my Monash University days and I took
some time out to write some new stuff in there to reflect my current
status. Like all “About me” pages, it might seem a little
self-indulgant, so don’t read it unless you don’t mind “About me”
pages. 🙂

Read it here [sixthseal.com] or at the persistant sidebar.

I have to go out now, later people!

The Weblog Review – The Imdateless.Com Website

November 1, 2003 by HB

Original review done for The Weblog Review:
The Weblog Review [theweblogreview.com].

The Imdateless.Com Website

The first thing I thought when I saw ImDateless.com is that it’s one of those match
making sites. The banner ad on the bottom of the splash page IS from a match making
site and I was wondering how this got into The Weblog Review. The site’s splash
page uses Flash, but there is an option for a non Flash entry page. I clicked on the
Flash intro and the animation reminded me of the Star Wars intro and while it’s not
as professionally animated as some Flash animations, it has a nice charm to it. It is
entertaining, if you have Flash, I suggest you watch the animation.

When I entered into the main page, I still thought it was a dating site, but
reading on shows that it is indeed a weblog, recounting experiences of this 24 year
old part time Retail Manager and university undergraduate student. The blog is in
the news section and it makes interesting reading, if you’re into personal blogs. I
find his writing easy to read since he somewhat writes in the same style as me and
he structures his paragraphs well.

Even though this is a fairly new site, it has a lot of content from his writings. I
found that the most interesting aspect of this site. He writes about a lot of things,
from his travel diaries to religion. I particularly enjoyed reading his trips around
Europe. He writes a day by day recount of his experience traveling and that is a
major attraction of this site if you like traveling stories.

Design wise, the site navigation is a little unusual, but the Expand All and
Collapse All dynamic navigational change does help in this aspect. However, I
found the sidebar too cluttered when it’s expanded. I also found the Membership and
Shopping pages to be distracting, although I can understand the need for it, since I
pay a lot for excess bandwidth fees as well. The site’s design isn’t exactly the best
out there, but that’s not the point – the content more than makes up for this.

Back to the content, a whois lookup revealed that the domain was registered on
the 12th of August 2003 and his blog begins on the same day! Even though it seems
like there is a scant 2+ months of entries, don’t let that dissuade you from visiting –
he has a lot of other writings to occupy you for many hours. He says he is a
“ubiquitous storyteller” – and I agree, his stories would entertain you.

I’m wondering what the hell this site is doing on my computer screen though. 😉

P/S – Read the 4th October 2003 entry if you didn’t get that one.

This site was reviewed on 2003-10-23 by sixthseal.
They felt this site belonged in the Entertainment category.
sixthseal felt that The Imdateless.Com Websit deserved a rating of 4.0

Link to site: The Imdateless.Com Website [imdateless.com].

Link to original review: The Imdateless.Com Website [theweblogreview.com].

Hello November!

November 1, 2003 by HB

I’ve done some minor tweaking on the site to optimize it. Stats
analysis found out that the CSS sixthseal.com is pulling is
ridiculously bloated, so I removed unnecessary functions from it. There
are other aesthetic changes eg trimming the rather long blog list and
adding several blogs into the “More blogs!” that I read but never got
around to adding them. Anyway, the front page links works this way – if
I’ve linked and read you since a long time ago, the link will still be
on the front page. New blogs that I’ve just started reading recently
are added into the expanded list.

The emails for myself and veritas has also been removed to avoid the
site appearing to be too “spammy” too Googlebot. The email links are in
the About pages anyway, which I need to update since it’s way out of
date. The PoTD won’t show up in archive view mode too and neither will
the “Notable Posts”, unless they’re navigated to from a post marked
notable. I’ve rotated the sticky posts somewhat too, there are too
many. BTW, the notable posts are supposed to be the better posts in
sixthseal.com so that was why the decision was made to make it sticky.
It’s still spammy but I’m aiming for SERPs rather than PR anyway.

I’ve also added a copyright notice on every page, it wasn’t clear in
the blog before. There’s also a bit of SEO work done, thanks to Steph
[unadorned.org] of dandruff, a fellow Sarawakian (born there anyway)
who actually replied my email about how she managed to get a PageRank
7. 🙂

Update:
Here’s some stats that might be of interest:

October 2003
Unique visits per day: 1397 (average) 2134 (max)

Top 3 referrers: Yahoo, Google, Erowid

#1 search string: kehidupan seorang pramugara yang terlampau (1042)
Permutations of the above accounts for half of the Top 20 keywords, with the other half being drug related search strings.

Countries:
Unresolved (37%)
Network (18%)
US Commercial (17%)
Australia (9%)
Malaysia (3%)
Singapore (3%)
US Educational (2%)
Canada (2%)
UK (2%)
Japan (1%)
Other (6%)
This is more balanced than previous stats (when I was in Melbourne) where Australian visitors dominates at around 40%.

Bandwidth used:
sixthseal.com – 12 GB
castitas.com – 9 GB

My excess bandwidth bill:
sixthseal.com – 12 GB – 5 GB = 7 GB
castitas.com – 9 GB – 5 GB = 4 GB
Total = 11 GB excess @ US$ 5 per GB
Amount = US$ 55 or RM 209

RM 209 is more than 1/7 of my monthly paycheck. Help! :p

Jemay, Prem and Rashidin’s birthday @ XM Malaysia

October 31, 2003 by HB

Cheesecake from Hotel Equatorial.

Today is TGIF, the monthly meeting at XM Malaysia. I will not be
talking about that though because its work related. However, I’ll like
to extend my apologies to Jarrod Chua for not remembering his name. We
have this “name the person” thing and I know everyone’s name from
Technical, Creative, Project Management, Account Management and Jit,
Bob and Yusnita but unfortunately not the Finance Administration
people. Oops. Anyway, there was also a celebration for Jemay, Prem and
Rashidin and here are the photos from that:

The candles on the cake being lighted.

Rashidin blowing out the candles. To his right is Jemay and Prem is on his left.

Prem cutting the cake.

Apparently, I’m the resident photographer of XM Malaysia now. 😉

Miscellaneous stuff

October 31, 2003 by HB

Goodbye October 2003. This is the 31st of October, the last day of
October, Halloween and the day Dr. Mahathir steps down as the Prime
Minister of Malaysia.

1. Dr. M is stepping down. I don’t talk about politics much due to
paranoia, but people who know me in real life know that I’m a staunch
supporter of Dr. Mahathir. He’s not afraid to speak his mind and he
doesn’t give in to Western influence. He’s someone who has BALLS for
the lack of a better term.

In contrast, I particularly dislike people like PM Goh Chok Tong of
Singapore. To put things crudely, he kisses every Caucasian and
Japanese ass that heads his way. I wonder if he wishes he was born
Caucasian sometimes.

Now Dr. M on the other hand, he’s not afraid of voicing his opinions
about the many infringements of the US and Australia against Asia. I’m
not going to go through everything because I don’t want to be seen as a
hardliner, but I’m sorry to see Mahathir go. Let’s hope that Datuk Seri
Abdullah Ahmad Badawi will continue Dr. M’s legacy.

We’re a sovereign country and we’re not going to take any shit from Bush, Howard or anyone other than our own people.

2. Google Dance. Yes, Google just did its thing recently.
sixthseal.com is still a PR 5 due to “spammy” site design (namely, the
persistent sidebar). I had hoped for a PR 6 this time. However, my
SERPs are still holding strong and I’ve captured certain keywords I’m
proud of. Heavy pimpage of castitas.com has also raised that site to a
PR 4, as I expected. Did you know that there’s a link to castitas.com
on every page of this site? 😉 I was expecting a PageRank of 1 less
than sixthseal.com and yeah, I got it. 🙂

3. Boo. It’s Halloween. I’ll update again later.

Mega Chicken Delice chicken sandwich @ RM 3.90

October 31, 2003 by HB

Ingredients: Fresh bread, fresh vegetables, spread, chicken slice, cheese, spices.

This is what I had for lunch…grabbed a sandwich from Gro-Shop, the
grocery shop at Wisma Antarabangsa (it’s interconnected to Kenanga
International).

Gro-Shop

I felt like eating a sandwich instead of rice and this one is pretty
good. It emphasizes fresh ingredients and I was not disappointed. The
bread was nice and soft and there’s a generous amount of egg and cheese
and a slice of deli chicken, all topped with a slathering of
mayonnaise. Here’s a close up: