i.justrealized

I have a pile of letters coming in from banks, insurance and school. I’m just leaving it there on my letter tray. I glance at them every day and blissfully ignore them. I especially hate it when they wrote a bunch of text for formality’s sake when all they want to say is: “Look, you need to pay XXX GBP263, do it before October or else.”

Cut the corporate crap, just go straight to the point. Or underline the main point or something. I’m always left transcoding from Formal to Human.

I wish they would just email me in a couple of sentence. Save those papers; I am not an accounting major. Kthxbai!

Thirty cents. Better than nothing. I’m literally using the money earned by another blog to pay for the existence of this blog. It’s sad that I spend more effort in this blog but I don’t get the visitors.

Some notes on ad revenue

Thoughtful posts don’t gain you visitors.

To get visitors, you need, I repeat, you need to blog silly things.

No one wants to know your opinion unless you’re a celebrity and have some say in things.

If part of your reason of blogging is to earn some pennies, never start a personal blog.

Start a link blog or something. Put up music for people to download (and violate from ahem ahem stuff), put lots of pictures that are either funny or cute. (Cute pictures like dogs, cats and rabbits are a winner.)

Don’t bother posting those male-female analysis, boy-girl relationship that could have been passed off as dissertation from some academic institution.

Blog with what’s trendy. Bill Gates retire? Blog about it, link it to another blog. iPhone released? Post pictures, and write a bunch of useless iPhone specifications.

Conclusion

Just don’t model your income generator after this blog.

At the end of 4 months, you will just earn thirty cents. That’s just my two cents. Okay, now I’m left with 28 cents, great.

Wired wrote something that got me tinking a bit. I’ll quote in excerpts, the full article is here. I’m more interested in the Singlish portions.

How English Is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand

An estimated 300 million Chinese — roughly equivalent to the total US population — read and write English but don’t get enough quality spoken practice. The likely consequence of all this? In the future, more and more spoken English will sound increasingly like Chinese.

It’s the 1.3 billion people can’t be wrong thing. If more Chinese speak in their Chinglish, they would be the majority. We can’t say the majority of English language speakers are speaking it wrongly, can we?

In Singaporean English (known as Singlish), think is pronounced “tink,” and theories is “tee-oh-rees.”

Dude, it’s Singapore English, not Singaporean English. I never heard of tee-oh-rees in Singapore anyway. Do we say that? I don’t tink so!

One noted feature of Singlish is the use of words like ah, lah, or wah at the end of a sentence to indicate a question or get a listener to agree with you. They’re each pronounced with tone - the linguistic feature that gives spoken Mandarin its musical quality - adding a specific pitch to words to alter their meaning. (If you say “xin” with an even tone, it means “heart”; with a descending tone it means “honest.”) According to linguists, such words may introduce tone into other Asian-English hybrids.

I haven’t thought of the ah, lah, loh stuff this way leh. To me, it was added to sound more casual and to fit in. If everyone doesn’t add this, no one would use it. It’s just to fit in. But our government launched a campaign to go against it - clearly not fitting in well enough.

And it’s possible Chinglish will be more efficient than our version, doing away with word endings and the articles a, an, and the. After all, if you can figure out “Environmental sanitation needs your conserve,” maybe conservation isn’t so necessary.

I tink we’re in some sort of transition. If the Chinese can end up standardizing English by bastardizing the current standard of English, so be it. We would see a bunch of English purist crying but hey, we switched old English to middle English to our modern English. Yeah, it took ages but today we are experiencing an acceleration on technology advancements, globalization etc.. Maybe we forgotten that language developments can accelerate too.

Welcome to post-modern Asianglish.

I’m honest! ‘Cause today - especially today - the blog actually loads faster than usual (i.e. all the yesterdays). Usually people write in to their web hosts to make complaints, saying this don’t work that don’t work. And when it works, they keep quiet.

I tell you what, later I’m going to write a short note to commend my web host (Media Temple) for their great work, erm, for today. And hopefully, for the many days to come too.

Holy crap, I’ll close window if I see such a CAPTCHA:

CAPTCHA is an almost standard method of human-detection during comment posting, user registration and Google search engine. (Google thinks I am a bot. No, Google, your search engine is the bot, silly.)

However, it really shouldn’t be. Image CAPTCHAs are set up to deter bots, users with malicious intent and my friend in college. But it achieves this by imposing a penalty toward genuine website visitors.

CAPTCHAs are becoming hard to solve these days as image recognition improves. It’s unfortunate that most sites implement harder-to-read CAPTCHAs that it’s so distressing and laborious to just read the darn squashed up vowels.

I’m at the age where it’s getting harder to make new friends. The lucky people have their good friends, the luckier ones have whom they would consider as best friends. I…

“I have many friends,” I tell myself.

I know a lot of people through many occasions but I couldn’t help but to feel jealous when I hear the word ‘good friend’ because I couldn’t think of any one that would regard me as ‘good friend’. Of course this is all relative, I have friends who I chat online once a year greeting me as “hey good friend”. But in my standards, I don’t think I am their ‘good friend’.

So it all goes back to primary school where you have a couple of good friends and for some strange egoistic reason you can actually be darn proud of it. As I grow older, the number of people whom I consider as good friends dropped to perhaps three. Or four. Okay three.

It become a lot of acquaintances, many friends and a couple of good friends. I struggle to keep friends. I just don’t have the ability to keep friends. Once I don’t communicate with people on the phone or in real life, it just drifts apart. It matters little that we could still meet up and we can hahaha together about good old times. My mind is just constantly injected with the possibility that things aren’t the same as before. And I just don’t feel this friendship somehow. Like it degraded into an acquaintanceship.

And then I start pondering, asking and asking myself why. Why am I this way? Are others the same? Do they have good friends? What do they think of me? Are they using me? Am I important to them? Why don’t I have someone to consider as a ‘best friend’?

You see, if I were to draw a graph, it would be a flattened bell curve. Meaning that I know many people but I have few close friends and few enemies. It’s bothering me a lot more since the beginning of this year. I keep thinking but I never gotten answers.

This insecurity affects me when I communicate with would-be good friends. It felt unnatural and sometimes it feels like I am trying too hard.

What should I do, what can I do?

Third day straight in Ubuntu. The lack of oxygen and the familiar ALT-Tab interface made breathing hard. Half the population has already been wiped out and an enemy space ship appeared out of no where to hold some of us hostage, I had to sacrifice my brother to escape being a hostage.

Anyway, Ubuntu turned out okay. Most of my annoyance is due to familiarity with Windows.

• Double clicking on the top-left hand icon did not close my window
• Yeah, I am still pressing the Windows button 7 times in the day and 12 times when I’m blur at night. Each time I do that I feel stupid, it’s like attempting to push open a door that says ‘Pull’. Intelligence minus 10.
• Can’t undo a deletion of file easily through Nautilius
• Whoever told me using Ubuntu is just like Windows hasn’t used either or both of the operating systems.
• Still pressing F6 in Firefox to highlight the awesome location bar
• Pidgin doesn’t yet support custom emoticons. I’m sure Uzyn would call this a feature.
• The default font gives me a headache, I had to change it to Lucida to feel a little better.
• GIMP… Okay, nevermind that already. It already received enough bashing.
• I like the most recently used programs to be display on the start menu. Sure I can always put them on my desktop manually but when you’re talking about a better overall experience, the OS ideally should be able to discover the user preference and suit the user without him or her knowing about it.

Windows does almost everything Ubuntu can do. User-interface-wise Ubuntu is still poorer. I hand Ubuntu to my father to use and he prefers Windows. My father touched neither of them. He like the Windows Teletubby land wallpaper and more attractive icons and also says he likes Windows’ Firefox. He somehow didn’t like the Ubuntu one. It’s the colors somehow and I just let him have Windows XP in the end.