Category Archives: Commentary

Haven’t been blogging because we, students are now preparing for the final rush. I probably wouldn’t be blogging at all for the next 2 month so don’t expect any updates soon. I’ll be coming up with a new design here to incorporate my design for a few new and pretty nice sites I have designed for my projects.

This final rush that we are all in for would take roughly another month, ending sometime early November. Hence, this blog can be considered ‘shut’ for the next 2 months. We still have no ideas for erpz.net. So I guess the frontpage would linger for a long time – it looks nice anyway. Bye, for now!

You know talking on MSN can pose quite a lot of problem. When you are not looking at the person, you’d feel strange when you are telling a joke and you can’t see the response. Then you probably go, “LOL”, or “Bleah”. Or maybe you decide to invent your own ‘random’ expressions – like “Vookibookk”, “Voogunihsabunda”.

Or perhaps others that do not start with ‘V’, like “Juulorubo” or most importantly, terms that cannot be pronounced, “Xusnaiur”. Then, you can give it a pronunciation yourself and no matter how well others may think they can read it, you say it’s wrong. And if you are really happy, you can fiddle with some punctuation and then you get stuff like “!Xusyllaernaiur”.

I was really inspired by this guy I was talking to, on MSN. He goes by a strange name, and a rather interesting appearance and [almost] commented that: “This dumb looking blog wif (sic) some green creature on the right muz (sic) be owned and authored by some dumb good-for-nothing guy who has nothing better to do in his damned boring life”. I must say…I agree with him absolutely!

Youngsters these days are really funny on MSN. They go “bleah” or “LOL” for almost everything that you tell them before giving their actual reply. It is as though they are having hiccups on MSN (except they don’t go ‘hic’)! And they substitute some of the most important key words used for communications with these ‘random expressions’. Here’s an example:

Vib: Hi, long time no chat

*Insanity: bleah -> ‘Bleah’ here meant: “Oh, hi!”

Insanity: Who are you?

Vib: Oh, it’s me. Vib.

Insanity: bleah. is that so? -> ‘Bleah’ here meant: “Vib. I haven’t talked to you?”

********
I don’t think you want to know the contents here.
********

Vib: Bye then!

Insanity: bleah -> ‘Bleah’ here meant: “Bye then. See ya!”

*Insanity happens to be the nick of the guy I earlier mentioned. Interesting.

You see, these teens are really good at saving time (and words). Just one word to replace so many. We don’t really need languages anymore. *LOL* (Followed by a series of ‘bleah-ccups’) MSN is really a interesting place to hang out if you have sufficient contacts like these – and I really mean ‘Insanity’. I owe you one for giving me the inspiration to type all these crap. I think you should also go and start a blog so that you have a chance to open fire at this post of mine.

Not the boring sabbatical that does absolutely nothing, but a nice blog that discuss issues seemingly pertinent to all our lives since we are all Singaporean(s) [students]. If I am not wrong, this is a WACOM tablet powered webcomic: The Students’ Sketchpad. I must say the stuff there are really well-drawn and there’s also interesting content.

There tonnes of Singapore students out there expert in Arts, and I am quite sure I won’t be able to outdo them in practical arts, so I think I am better off in the Academic Arts stream in future. Then I will once again fall into the trap and become another student manipulated by the ministry as mentioned in one of their comics. I will be fooled to participate in the mini-education-ratrace and be following the ‘syllabus’ and tricked by the ‘charisma’ of the teachers into entering the politically-correct carreers such as doctors, lecturers, teachers, lawyers (not as welcomed), accountants and engineers.

Hey, artist these days get paid quite well. Of course, you have to be really good. And using a WACOM tablet and illustrating such comics probably means professionalism in Singaporean context. Nah, don’t fault me for over-generalisation – Singaporeans are like that. ‘Not all the Hwa Chong type are very Chinese’ – a statement to counter the Singaporean-styled generalisation that Hwa Chong people are always Chinese-type.

This advertisement is brought to you by Vib – do go and take a look at that blog.

Further Findings (3 September 2005):

I realised that they aren’t using WACOM, they are working with a tablet. I guess I was acting a little too pro when I made that guess. I found out the truth here.

I rarely do propaganda for others, but I seriously think that Internet Explorer is screwed. Browser Happy is a site dedicated to educating people about the harms that Internet Explorer brings and promote alternative browser softwares. Do visit it and download the suitable browser for your browsing experience.

By the way, if you browse this site with Internet Explorer, and then compare it with the view on Mozilla Firefox, you will realise that there seems to be a difference in the way they process the colour codes of the background. I am not sure why but it doesn’t make a single sense. Basically, Internet Explorer doesn’t really deliver the content as desired by the programmer at times, in fact, most of the times.

Personally, I use Firefox as a primary browser, with Internet Explorer as the secondary. This is mainly because of the large number of Visual Basic driven site, which I have to access. Firefox don’t seem to be able to process certain of the Visual Basic coding. Too bad. Nonetheless, Internet Explorer is still giving me problems like crazy pop-ups. In school, we also see those computer-dumb (not illiterate, just dumb) teachers who have tonnes of spywares and virus on their computers, the explanation – Internet Explorer.

So the final message: Avoid the Blue ‘E’, Down with ‘IE’.

Somehow, this PC Show post got posted about 7 times on my blog. I have no idea why. I probably clicked the publish button a little too many times (my sister disconnected my computer from the net at the exact moment when I clicked publish for the first time).

Mib’s life is screwed. So is US actually any better than Singapore? Probably not. But still, we are screwed by the system over here. This is a great example. As for Terry, he is so screwed by his power supply. Okay, enough of screwed stuff. For those so wants peace, with nothing exciting, please vist Newspeaker. Given the little crap there, I doubt anyone actually discovered that Newspeaker have existed for almost a month already!

After taking about 5 minutes to admire the review Terry has done of my blog, I felt rather dismayed by the fact that I scored the same ratings as Weixiang. Well, it isn’t that bad though I have to say that my blog is definitely more readable than Weixiang’s. Nonetheless, I seem to fare batter than Bingyuan and Mib, so I am rather satisfied.

The holidays are coming and I probably spend more time blogging. During the December holidays last year, I churned out tonnes of political post, which is now in an archive word document stored in my computer. Those were pretty crappy now that I look back at them and laugh at the lame jokes I have cracked about the school and fat people.

Reading Terry’s post on his site stats, I should perhaps, subscribe more such information so that I can have a better picture of how my site fare against others. Nonetheless, they are just pure tools of amusement that bring nothing much to life anyway. I initially typed a Chinese Article but that was on my auntie’s laptop, and I forgot to send it back to my email so alas, I am not able to post it here today. It talks about ‘substance’, the thing we should have before going on to do anything.

After I realised that people have the tendency to auto-skip Chinese posts, I am injected with a dose of confidence in criticising the school or whatever organisation with Chinese instead of English, since those big shot people most probably do not really understand Chinese. Hehe. Who really cares about the blog of a non-scholarship holder anyway. We are regarded as humans with low intellect, who deserves no attention.

In case you haven’t noticed, Bingyuan has just put back all the ‘censored stuff back on to his blog. That’s supposed to be good news unless he accidentally revealed them and would be switched the posts back to hidden mode. I really thought he was afraid that his form teacher or whatever would go to his blog and realised how critical and lame he is. Well, it appears that he have had his fears removed. Or perhaps it is because he has no wonderful content to show lately so he decided that the ‘censored’ stuff aren’t really that censor-deserving after all.

It appears that people are now discussing a great deal of stuff on blogging stuff that may be ‘dangerous’ due to political or defaming nature. Well, I thought this is pretty lame because I believe in the Internet, there is no way of control. When a site goes down, another one comes on again. Most importantly, you are not able to punish certain people who may have been blogging somewhere else in another nation where certain laws probably doesn’t apply. The deterence isn’t going to work.

As for non-political or defaming stuff, they are starting to get a little bored. Terry seems to be running out of ideas, especially when he is the type of blogger, who does it everyday unless he has no access to a computer. This is probably a down time for him and other of those bloggers. I probably should switch off my system too.

In case you haven’t noticed, Bingyuan has just put back all the ‘censored stuff back on to his blog. That’s supposed to be good news unless he accidentally revealed them and would be switched the posts back to hidden mode. I really thought he was afraid that his form teacher or whatever would go to his blog and realised how critical and lame he is. Well, it appears that he have had his fears removed. Or perhaps it is because he has no wonderful content to show lately so he decided that the ‘censored’ stuff aren’t really that censor-deserving after all.

It appears that people are now discussing a great deal of stuff on blogging stuff that may be ‘dangerous’ due to political or defaming nature. Well, I thought this is pretty lame because I believe in the Internet, there is no way of control. When a site goes down, another one comes on again. Most importantly, you are not able to punish certain people who may have been blogging somewhere else in another nation where certain laws probably doesn’t apply. The deterence isn’t going to work.

As for non-political or defaming stuff, they are starting to get a little bored. Terry seems to be running out of ideas, especially when he is the type of blogger, who does it everyday unless he has no access to a computer. This is probably a down time for him and other of those bloggers. I probably should switch off my system too.

For those who are observant enough, you would realise at once that I have changed the Propagator’s Croc a little, adding ‘eyes’ to make it look a little friendlier. I started off with this idea of making an proper avatar for myself in different places. Unfortunately, I have my identity hidden for certain places and not for certain websites. So I decided that the avatar will solely be for my participation in more crappy, techie websites. Here it is, the 50px by 50px version of it:

The first look of it give me an impression that it is a sign warning children to have parent guidance when viewing anything that is posted by me. Originally, I was using the old unfriendly croc’s eye and it looked really evil. Hence, I decided to amend a little to appeal to children. Unfortunately, I couldn’t change the letters ‘P’ and ‘G’. They were in caps at first but I quickly change them to small letters. I guess you guys should know why.

The ‘croc’ looks as though it portrays the parents eyes looking at everyone – especially for the children; with the purpose to instil fear in them and deter them from doing wrong things. To a large extent, the avatar seem to work well with such a feature to scare children. The things I write is not immoral, not as evil and extreme as what Mib normally writes about, but they are usually not suitable for children since it has a high tendency of distorting their perception about the world – I don’t want to make them unhappy.

The background is not black. It is a dark shade of brown that is blend with a light gray. It does look simple here but it is supposed to achieve the effect of a warm feeling despite the color being a dark one. It blends in better with the green of the crocodile and the orange text, making it the perfect background for the avatar. The orange text, of course, is to mix with the green to achieve the similar effect that my website’s design is built upon.

That’s the problem when you have a strange logo coupled with a dubious name; you produce an avatar that makes no sense or connection to your original idea. I guess you guys would soon see this avatar appearing on certain forums or communities, that’s me – unless one of you decides to pass off as me and kope this avatar. Sometimes, you may see this avatar appearing but the name isn’t ‘Vib’. It probably isn’t me, though I didn’t really fully adopt the screen name, ‘Vib’ yet. I have so many other accounts that uses purely my own name. I guess it will take another year or 2 before I use it for everything I register.

For those who are observant enough, you would realise at once that I have changed the Propagator’s Croc a little, adding ‘eyes’ to make it look a little friendlier. I started off with this idea of making an proper avatar for myself in different places. Unfortunately, I have my identity hidden for certain places and not for certain websites. So I decided that the avatar will solely be for my participation in more crappy, techie websites. Here it is, the 50px by 50px version of it:

The first look of it give me an impression that it is a sign warning children to have parent guidance when viewing anything that is posted by me. Originally, I was using the old unfriendly croc’s eye and it looked really evil. Hence, I decided to amend a little to appeal to children. Unfortunately, I couldn’t change the letters ‘P’ and ‘G’. They were in caps at first but I quickly change them to small letters. I guess you guys should know why.

The ‘croc’ looks as though it portrays the parents eyes looking at everyone – especially for the children; with the purpose to instil fear in them and deter them from doing wrong things. To a large extent, the avatar seem to work well with such a feature to scare children. The things I write is not immoral, not as evil and extreme as what Mib normally writes about, but they are usually not suitable for children since it has a high tendency of distorting their perception about the world – I don’t want to make them unhappy.

The background is not black. It is a dark shade of brown that is blend with a light gray. It does look simple here but it is supposed to achieve the effect of a warm feeling despite the color being a dark one. It blends in better with the green of the crocodile and the orange text, making it the perfect background for the avatar. The orange text, of course, is to mix with the green to achieve the similar effect that my website’s design is built upon.

That’s the problem when you have a strange logo coupled with a dubious name; you produce an avatar that makes no sense or connection to your original idea. I guess you guys would soon see this avatar appearing on certain forums or communities, that’s me – unless one of you decides to pass off as me and kope this avatar. Sometimes, you may see this avatar appearing but the name isn’t ‘Vib’. It probably isn’t me, though I didn’t really fully adopt the screen name, ‘Vib’ yet. I have so many other accounts that uses purely my own name. I guess it will take another year or 2 before I use it for everything I register.