Futile Attempt

I had made some affort to include my real life friends to visit my blog but so far only a few show some interest.

With the help of StatCounter I am able to see where in the world that my blog has been open. So far I seems to have frequent visit from Malaysia the most :) And most people visit my blog from Paul's Bedtime Stories the most.

Well back to my rant... So far I was able to get two friends to visit my blog. One was Nordic and another was a dutch man whom I befriended over the net sometimes ago. My message on one of my previous post did not yield any result eventhough I had email that person with specific instruction :pp darn...

Now I don't know what else to blog about... Right now I am in my office and getting really hungry and I cannot go fid something to eat... Not in the few minute anyway :ppp

Damn Spammers and My Fable Overdose

I have been somewhat lazy and torns between subjects of rant to be added here... I have a bit of enlightenment ideas for you guys to read so I guess I will just type it down now and explain the meaning of the subject later.

Spam mails, there is no need to explain that word. If you are reading my blog chances are you already know what pain in the ass (and not in the good way) spam mails are. But what you probably did not realize is that You actually PAY your hard earn money for the sending of spam mails.

Why did I say that? I know this for sure when I combine three seemingly unrelated stories that I have read and learned through out the year.

1. About 60%-70% of emails traffic on the internet are spam mails. Yeap it's getting really bad ever since people began warning that it will be a problem and now none of the politicians have the spine to stamp out these spammers.
2. Any ISP (Internet Service Provider) will generally setup their email server with 50% capacity more than the peak traffic just in case (as it's the genereal practise in this business.) And with the epidemic I mention above, ISPs will have to setup their email servers to be much larger than without the spam mails' traffic. Plus not to mention that they have to install spam mail filters and keep it upto dates. All of which cost money.
3. What I learn in business class? Companies will always push their expense to the consumers in the form of the price of their product. Which, in this case, will be the price of your internet service from your ISP.

So what will you get when you combine all the stories above? You ended up paying higher internet cost due to unrealistic email traffic cause by spammers in the form of higher internet cost!! Seriously I think spam issues should be handle by Interpol since internet is global afterall. Company setup in one country can do business in another and avoiding the laws. Too bad the world have other serious issues to focus on this white collar scumbags.

Anyway... I recently got meself a new game called Fable: The Lost Chapters. An Action-RPG game from Lionheads studio of Peter Moleneux the man who concieve Populus, Dungeon Keerpers, Magic Carpet, and Black & White. In this new title you will play as a hero set out to fulfill his destiny and he can choose to be either good or bad in the process. The idea was to allow you to play as good or bad the way you like it. But you end up with just the different look of your character and that's it. It's much easier to play as good guy instead of bad guys since most of the things you have to defeat for experince will add to your good alingment.

Still the game is quite fun :) With the rather unique stat increase method you will see your character grow from a scrawny young man to tall muscular man :) And for magic users you will also get bluish arcane patterns all over your body as well. Click here for bigger picture

There are several hair style, facial hairs and tattoos so u can customize your characters as well. That's my character :) Isn't he look cool??
I have been playing this game for about a week now... My sleep time is totally ruined :p

My soon-to-be new Acquisition

My current mobile phone is... well I could not say crappy because it still works (except for the battery which need to be recharge almost daily and I call out only about once day!).

But as a techono minded person I do like to have new mobile phone, the newer one that can play MP3 and use it as ringtones, have digital camera for discreetly doing candid shot of cute foreigners :dd The one that I have been eyeing for several months is the new Sony Ericsson Walkman phone w800i.

It has enamel white body with metallic orange stripe along the side, 2MPixel CMOS camera , mp3 player with better grade earplug headphone sets with 512MB memory stick included in the pack. Sounds like a dream came true for audiophiles who wants their mobile phone to play mp3 as well :). I almost forgot to mention that the phone can be recharge when connected to computer via USB connector!!

My only problem with SE is that in all their preview and advertising image of the phone, the enamel white (which make the phone looks cheap overall) front and back looks more silvery metallic instead. I was completely shock when I saw the preview image from a mobile phone website that take pictures of the real phone. Like I mention above, the silvery body became enamel white and it did not look nice AT ALL!!!

Anyhow I am still considered this one since I am certain I would use it for all it worths :) However, currently the phone still selling at minimum 18,700 baht which is quite steep for my budget. I am not in a hurry though... And I heard that w550i will began selling in about two weeks. Hopefully, that should help bring the price of this one down a notch or two.

Being gay in Bangkok

Inspired by Paul's comment in my previous post I decided to do this post as a ranting of sort about gay life in general.

When you look at being gay in all aspect, it is Not abnormal behavior or that big of a deal. To think that some people dedicate their life to anti-gay course repulses me , after all there are more serious issues than how some men wants to share their bed with another men.

I hate when people use religions as an excuse of their own bigotry. Talk about blind fate!!

As for life in Bangkok, I would say that there is no better places to be gay than in Thailand. We are mostly tolerated people. You will find ladyboys working as salesperson in many shops in the shopping mall as well as in the perfume section in their long hairs and makeups! . I wondered if this is common in any other countries, if anybody from other countries could tell me in the comment section I would be very appreciated.

I would say that gay people in Bangkok are mostly safe here in most account... However, the newspapers will always add the word 'gay' when the crime was committed by gay or when the victim was gay, I heard some lament about whether this is necessary to put it so blatantly that this happen to or by gay.

Even so, I still think that Bangkok, or even Thailand, is the best place to be gay in the world. Since this is Buddhism country and it's been taught for a long time that what happen in this life is the results of our actions in previous life. So mostly people just left us alone thinking that we pay for our karma in this life as gay or it might be as simply as they just mind their own business.

And really People, what is the big deal about men wanted to have sex with other men?? As per old saying in Thais. It's not like we did it on your head so F*uck off would ya idiot fundamentalists??

Music Man

Thinking back, I seems to began my journey to became the guy who almost always carried some type of music players whenever I was outside in my highschool year.

I remembered that I ask my mom for a double deck cassette player for one of my birthday and I did get it :) I began making complilation tapes on it and then listen to my own complicaton tapes on the walkman. I switch school from the one I have been in since the first grade when I was at 9th grade to another one the uniform codes also change a bit. This leads to the change from my using of carried bag to backpack and I love it! (although it doesn't help toning up my arms :p) My new backpack have side pocket which fit perfectly with walkman in the left and tarot cards in the right. I will mostly be seens walking around with my backpack on my back and earbuds headphones in my ears.

Which leads up one traumatic point in highschool where I was in the teacher lounge for some reason and one teacher ask me if I am a student of deaf people school. I was shock by her words not to mention that I heard it very clearly since eventhough the earbud headphone still in my ears the walkman was not playing. I wish I had said something or make a big scene out of it. Being a good quiet kid that I was I said nothing...

Now back to my main story. After many years of using walkman, I began to record songs from radio station with my first intension of wanted to play it to sales person at record store to identify the songs so I can buy it later. But after sometimes I just keep record songs from radio telling myself that I would only buy what I really need to buy :) Later on I found internet and learn from Nordic that I can download mp3 audio files from internet via IRC which open up a new venue for me. And now the files became more useful since I had replace my walkman for mp3 player :)

My collections and taste are mostly R&B, Pop, Rock, and Classical. I seems to have a special place in my heart for many of 80's R&B singers like Aretha Franklin, Patti LaBelle, and Gladys Knight :)

Sometimes when I play my mp3 collections on my computer I would sing along to the heart breaking tunes of Richard Marx 'Until I Find You Again' or Mariah Carey 'Cry' or Meatloaf 'I'd Lie For You (And That's The Truth') :)

It's Good to be BAD

Of all the strategy games that has good side and evil side. 98% of those will have you play the good side, 1% will let you pick side and the other 1% will have you play the evil side :)

One of the most well-known title of the last 1% is Dungeon Keeper series. You will play as a dungeon master out to conquer the world and defeat all the good guys that dare stand in your way :) I must say that I love the torture room the most since it allow you to convert the captured unit to your side (insert evil laugh here)

Anyhow, not many later developers seem to be interested in letting you play the bad guys until Sick Puppies Inc. came along with Ghost Master.

In this game you will be playing as a civil servant type in the afterlife and you have been given a mission to terrorise the populations of Gravenville :) You will command a pack of ghosts or Haunters as they were called in this game. The locations included Sorority house (where else :p), Frat house, and police stations just to name a few. In each mission, there will be ghost trapped there and will be required to fulfill certain objectives to free them and became one of your haunters. The level of difficulty are ranging from medium to downright maddening... Since the faster you can complete the mission, the more gold phalsm you will gain for training your haunters new scare technique :)

The demo is also available at the official sites. So try it if you like to play bad guys for a change :) You might realize something hidden tendencies *evil laugh*

Party! Party!

Yeap, I jsut got back from my company's Party. For some reason they venue this times is on the other side of the city. It took about two and half hours on the road to get there from the starting point at the company building on a big coach bus. The route (according to my mom) have to go through the old part of the city which is usually heavy with traffic + Friday evening + rain = Long Long hours on the road with yours truly haven't eat anything before hand with the intension of stuffing my face with the food at the party.

However, once we got there and wait for the event to officialy began (people allow to go pick up food) it was quite alright. I had sashimi (raw fish japanese style), pasta, roasted lamp's legs and some dessert as cakes and fruits.

Now I am full and felt like ready for bed :) Which will happen in a while. It's been raining pretty much daily for about a week now and it make the night so comfortable for sleeping.

Carb + Fat = Flavours

Why do we human seem to have weakness for that combination? You would find that the formula can be apply on wide variety of foods whether it's appitizers, main dishes, or desserts. I suppose it could be easily to explain since we all survive on consuming both Carb. and Fat for our energy therefore we were programmed to like the flavours of them. The food industry certainly use and even abuse the formula into making billions dollars business, think carb. + fat + salt!!

I began to have this urge to visit Daidomon again... I would probably do so next week :dd

A sidenote for one of my friend in NY whom I put up a link to his business on my sidebar. I have receive a self-portrait from one of my friend which I would like to share it with you. But first, I wants to know if you have read my blog or not. Please post your comment for this post as acknowledgement and I will email you the picture ;) I can guaranteed it will be worth it...

Long rant and my Mule :)

At first I did not realize that there seems to be limit per post and I rant too long about the whole deal. I guess I was hoping that Paul of Bedtime Stories would read and understand the idea of it since he himself said that he is a techno himbo (his words not mine ;)) Anyhow I will just say that all those three software are decent in their own ways and for the moment one should have all three and like I mention already, Scan your machine with them and do the Update Weekly.

Now about my Mule. I suppose many have heard of P2P and KaZaa faisco. For those who do not know what I am talking about, P2P is short for Peer 2 Peer, a type of program that allow people to share the files they have in their machine to other people in the same network. At first this concept were use mainly to share MP3 music files. That's until Napster got sued by RIAA and while Napster went under the concept live on and grow from just sharing MP3 to sharing just about any files.

The Ex-leader of the pack is KaZaa whose company also got sued by RIAA with the same charge. The court process is still pending. With KaZaa getting sue many people switch to another network and software (as do I) to eDonkey/ED2K network and my choice of software is eMule.

You can find many things using this program. Ranging from mp3 to various movies to softwares and games most of which would be define by the law as illegal as its against copyrights laws. But the amount of people who using this program prove that they don't care :p Besides I must assert my point that the stuffs that I had downloaded are not available in my country.

Anyhow you can read the details at eMule's official website. Since this network use upload/download ratio to calculate your rating to be use for cue setting, I would like to recommended that you should have some files to share at first (eMule allowed multiple share folder setup) so you can built up your rating while waiting for your downloads. However, I must warn you guys that in order to completely download most files you need to left your computer and your connection on 24/7. So it is best to use this with broadband connection otherwise your phone bills will be sky high :)

How to rid your computer of Adware (read Scumware)

Adwares and Spywares (read Scumwares) are becoming more and more daring and downright agony in many cases. I could only assumed that 99% of the politicians all over the globe are just too old and too caught up in their own agenda to care about this issue which becoming more and more threatening.

Why are these wares a problem? Because these adwares and spywares will use the Limited Resources (most notably part is RAM which is more demanding in newer OS) in Your computer for their own gains. Some will track your surfing habits, some will altered your configuration so that you have to see their websites more often, some will pelt you with advertising pop-ups every 3 seconds, and some will even trick you into making international call for porn (in the case of dial-up connection.) To make the matter worst, when you have these junks littered in your system it will slow down your computer since many will keep themselves running in the background. Not to mention your internet speed that will also be tampered with the traffics to their scummy search sites and ads.

Now as I already mentioned, things have became so bad, that just one adware removal software is no longer enough!! You should have at least two or three just in case since these products seems to target different sort of adwares and spywares. I would recommend these three softwares that is a must in your internet computer (especially those with broadband connection):

A) Spyware Doctor

B) Ad-Aware

C) SpyBot Search & Destroy

Each should be run and updated weekly. They are all good and I have used all three.

It is quite a wondered to think that these scumwares became more like virus rather than simple pesky adwares that could be easily removed. Have most of us net denizens became such ignorants to this issues that it became this out of control?

MSN Web Messenger

I have heard about this just today and due to a case of restlessness so I would blog about this now.

So the topic of today is MSN Web Messenger or http://webmessenger.msn.com/default.aspx?R=1 :) I read about it on my webboard. What is it you say? It is a web version of MSN Messenger. However, the difference from the normal version is that it get the connect through http. So it will works in any computer that could open website.

It is perfect for people who:

A) Do not, cannot, or wanted to install MSN Messenger on the particular computer for whatever reasons.

B) They are in the situation with limited internet access ie. in the office (like yours truly, who could only open websites on office's computer)

It does, however, have a bit of limitation such as no file transfer function and no webcam function. But I suppose those are just minor issues while the main functions work perfectly.

I must say that I am surprise that Microsoft do this. Afterall their reputation for only performing *just enough* are wellknown among the tech industry. I recently read an article saying that Microsoft crush their competitors by offering their own version of the product which were not superior than the competitors but only at the same level. This seems to be the reason why they beats Lotus, Netscape, and many others but not Google but that's for another post.

Men just don't Call!

This particular issue had always been nagging me ever since I have been 'reaching out' to other people. I have made some friends but no matter how good those friends are (Nordic and Mr. American for example) they rarely call me on the phone while it was me who called them up 99% of the times.

Nordic would have good excuse since he is a computer person like me and if we wanted to communicate we can easily do it via email. Mr. American on the other hand... I suppose he is already busy enough with his life and family that I would not have gone through his thought much.

But I guess that's what I have to bare with since I just happen to made friend with people who eventually have busier life than I do. However, through out the time that I had been on the net try to look up with cute guys who stop by Bangkok and all those times that I spend watching American TV programmes I have reach one conclusion.

Most Men are Pigs who just don't Call! This happens among gay men as well not just the disease that are among straight men only. Sometimes I just wish that my *friends* would just call me first just to talk not because they want something from me.

For some reason, this pattern also happened me on IMs (Instant Messenger) as well. Since I use Trillian I logged on to MSN, Yahoo, AOL, and ICQ all at once and most of the times I have to initiate the chat, IMing them to say Hi first to start the conversation. Not because I was quick to say Hi, since I tried to wait and see if they would notice that I was on as well. More often than not they were just there and never say hi... In retrospect this might be the same case I already mentioned. They are just too busy with their own things to think about little ole me...

Sometimes I have to agreed with the phase 'People who don't need people are the luckiest people in the world' Their world might be lonely and quiet but they were not bother by that! Better than being lonely and wanted to be reached instead of keep reaching out all the times...

3 times the Chocolates :d

Today is the first day they began showing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and after checking the showtime on the net I realize that there is one perfect time for me to go and it's in digital as well!

I live near a shopping mall (just across the street, it's very convenience) and it also have multiplex movie theater. So before I see the movie I have this craving for chocolate so I decided to go down to the supermarket and get meself a Mars bar (I prefer Mars over Snickers) :dd and a bottle of water.

I must say that visually the movie looks great. The most important scene visually is probably the first room with the chocolate river+fountain. I guess afterward the rest of the room look... not as exciting. I did not get what the firework room was suppose to be though. Perhaps I should get the book... The only book I ever read of Roald Dahl was The Witches though. Overall the movie was alright...

And after the movie was over I decided I want another chocolate :) So I went to the supermaket again and this times get Hershey's Chocolate bar with cookie bits :)

And on a side note. I recently take a picture of the sky while on the crossover near my place so I wanna get soem comment. I took it with my digital camera, nothing fancy though ; Just simple skyscape picture :) Here it is

Click Here for Full view :)

Barber Times

I usually went to salon once a month to get a hair cut. I did not have specific dates to go though, just when I felt that my hair is getting rather bushy or I began to felt warm at the top :)

Although I should feel lucky to be able to comb my fingers through my hair and still have the bushy feelings. Unlike my friend Mr. American, he no longer have that luxury any more :P

So in a few days I will hit the salon, I guess I will go with my usual cut. Short on the side and the back and perhaps have it a bit long in the front and on the top...