OK so Ern Sheong has gotten himself rid of that sales job with iZZi Wireless Broadband which required him to work all weekend and practically 9 hours a day in a shopping center trying to sell people one thousand ringgit broadband packages. (I actually got a promotion to booth supervisor, but when I realised that the basic pay did not change and the working hours were still that gruelling, I quit anyway =P)

Well I was enjoying my days off after 31st of March (the day I quit) and spent my days hanging out or sleeping late and getting up even later. Nothing in store for me. No plans to do anything. But then before the week was up my mum obtained for me an internship with her friend’s company, i.e. a telco company in Malaysia (no not Telekom, much smaller private company called Telshine Telecommunication) (Somehow it’s weird how things are always planned nicely before me. It just comes. I did not even have to search for both of the jobs I landed since coming back from Singapore. I have to thank God for that.)

I started my job on the 7th of April, and for the past week I have been following an engineer around the entire Klang Valley changing the gateway number for the dialer used to connect to the call server at Telshine (discounted call service). I went to the semiconductor factory StatsChipPac in Shah Alam, Gardenia in Shah Alam, Transwater Api in Bandar Sri Damansara, Aker Solutions at Wisma Hong Leong … bla bla bla so so many companies and so so many factories that I cannot remember anymore. But of course, the pay is lousy. But I can claim petrol and make money out of the petrol allowance! XD

This week I expect to be be driving out on my own to meet clients and do the required maintainance since I have learnt how to deal with most of the troubleshooting needed to fix faulty dialers and how to reprogramme the gateway via plugging in a handset.

Saturday went to the PIKOM PC Fair at KL Convention Centre and got myself a pair of SonicGear earphones for RM 45 (bad publicity for this company, but sorry have to announce it: Your earphones are lousy!!!). Got home and realised that the sound quality was way inferior to that of the original iPod’s =.=

Then I went to church later part of my Saturday and found out that there was some audition for dancers to perform in a special church musical production.

The weird thing about this was that I signed up for the audition:

ES: Hi, I would like to try out for the dance production.
Girl:  Sure, just fill in your particulars here on this form.

While I was filling up the form…

Girl: So, what kind of dance are you currently in? Hip hop?
ES: er…. uh…. ar…. no experience
Girl: It’s okay just come for the try-outs…

Thanks. Phew.

Sweat.

Sunday I was paid to go to a volunteer training session for the World Congress of IT happening this May. I was even given free lunch and three complimentary tea breaks. (There is such thing as a free lunch!) Well I signed up to volunteer for the event months ago (I blogged about it before) so here I was at the training session for one entire day along with 300 other people. Not bad, rather fun. (Paid RM 80 a day for volunteering, training days included) I was allocated to Sales (aka PR) and was posted at the KL Convention Center IT Exhibition during the conference (May 18-22, 2008). Maybe you guys can visit me there! And owh I was also very fortunate to make some great new friends there at the training… hi Aaron from Monash and Peng from APIIT!

Yeah so came back home, had dinner… and decided to drag my father to the DVD shop (whoops! shhhh. hope the police do not read my blog XD). Bought 6 DVDs and watched Step Up (yeah I know I am slow…) at night. Great movie. Makes me feel like dancing too! =) And the girl’s hot =P

So that sums up my week. Not to mention Cell Group, 2 birthday outings, and well, the sad part earlier in the week at Andrew’s wake. Rest in peace, bro.

OK now back to my “How Dell Does It” book before I retire to bed. I really respect and admire Dell.

Good night people. God Bless.

Alright haven’t found much time to blog lately (for 3-4 days already) and due to my crazy working hours… starting at 2 pm and ending at 11 pm everyday. And yes I cannot get up in the morning and usually I get up in time for lunch or for driving lessons (YES I AM ONLY LEARNING NOW). Coupled with some flu and cough lately it really spoils my mood to blog and I can’t stay up as late as I used to (need to recover mah).

Oh yes btw I am now “curi tulang”-ing at my workplace at Giant Kelana Jaya to write this blog post.

But the past few days have been rather… fun… in a different way. For the better part of yesterday and today (and tomorrow there’s another appointment) I have been spending hours at customer’s houses setting up iZZi’s internet connection since Scream-X’s connection by TM Nut have been causing them a lot of headaches. There were also problems with wireless routers and wireless USB adapters. I am rather amazed that people look at me and expect me to solve their router and internet configuration headaches. I also least expect myself to be some tech guy who knows a lot about how to configure computer stuff (but of course I did not disappoint them and solved whatever computer troubles that they had =P )

Frankly, I am just a tech-savvy user. But incidentally I want to study Electrical and Computer Engineering given my interest in comp stuff. So perhaps i can be a real tech-genius in the future managing a company of tech-geniuses.

Random - Advice for people who want to use Vista: Don’t do it. Keep your XP. Seriously. Recently-leaked e-mails between Microsoft employees show that even Microsoft employees were aware that present computers do not have enough specifications to run Vista smoothly. Read more here and here. Skeptical? Ask your friend who just bought a Vista-powered computer recently. (Unless you have 4GB RAM, your computer will be slow and bound to hang) If you have the cash, get a Mac. (which is the main reason why I am working now, to save enough for a Macbook Pro)

The Microsoft-Yahoo Marriage

Microsoft has launched an unsolicited hostile bid for Yahoo! at the price of USD 44.6 BILLION. They have the intention to take on the world’s No. 1 internet search leader, Google, which is by far the one with the largest market share of internet searches and is making much more revenue in online advertising than Yahoo’s and Microsoft’s revenues combined. This is a classic case of the No. 2 and No. 3 teaming up to compete with the No. 1. If successful, this deal would eventually mean that the world of search would be handled by a duopoly, Google and Microsoft. As David Drummond, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer of Google puts it in the Google Blog:

So Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It’s about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.

Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies — and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.

Indeed, Microsoft, the Windows OS and software giant is witnessing a boom in the growth of companies such as Google and Apple, which now directly threaten its very existence. It seems to be switching strategies to play catch-up with the online advertising leaders by offering a bid to swallow Yahoo!

Yahoo!
Brian McGuiness/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Reactions gathered about this bid go both ways. Some say that if Microsoft and Yahoo join hands, the world benefits from having a more sizable competitor for Google, thus enabling users to enjoy the benefits of healthy competition that churns out better innovation. Perhaps this might be so, but Google’s search technology is far more superior to that of MSN’s or Yahoo!’s. Proof? Just use it yourself. It has been ages since I have used a Yahoo! search engine or MSN Search. When I did, Google inevitably gives me more quality results for my searches. So the Microsoft-Yahoo company must come up with an even better technology to rival Google’s PageRank algorithms.

Microsoft

Here’s what Steven Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft Corporation wrote in a letter to the board of directors of Yahoo!:

Microsoft and Yahoo! can offer a credible alternative for consumers, advertisers, and publishers. Synergies of this combination fall into four areas:

— Scale economics: This combination enables synergies related to scale economics of the advertising platform where today there is only one competitor at scale. This includes synergies across both search and non-search related advertising that will strengthen the value proposition to both advertisers and publishers. Additionally, the combination allows us to consolidate capital spending.

– Expanded R&D capacity: The combined talent of our engineering resources can be focused on R&D priorities such as a single search index and single advertising platform. Together we can unleash new levels of innovation, delivering enhanced user experiences, breakthroughs in search, and new advertising platform capabilities. Many of these breakthroughs are a function of an engineering scale that today neither of our companies has on its own.

– Operational efficiencies: Eliminating redundant infrastructure and duplicative operating costs will improve the financial performance of the combined entity.

— Emerging user experiences: Our combined ability to focus engineering resources that drive innovation in emerging scenarios such as video, mobile services, online commerce, social media, and social platforms is greatly enhanced.

However, another concern is the integration of two behemoths with its different set of cultures and work-ethics. Also, Yahoo! and Microsoft are now bleeding talent to many other start-ups such as Facebook, Mozilla and many younger start-ups. By the time the acquisition is over, the talents that drove both Yahoo! and Microsoft may already be drained. Many of the engineers there have left or are talking about leaving.

In the meantime, Google has came out publicly against the bid by Microsoft, referring the offer as a threat to competition.

A NY Times article reports:

Privately, Google, seeing the potential deal as a direct attack, went much further. Its chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, placed a call to Yahoo’s chief, Jerry Yang, offering the company’s help in fending off Microsoft, possibly in the form of a partnership between the companies, people briefed on the call said.

Google’s lobbyists in Washington have also begun plotting how it might present a case against the transaction to lawmakers, people briefed on the company’s plans said. Google could benefit by simply prolonging a regulatory review until after the next president takes office.

What would happen next?

I want to share a browser feature called Cooliris with all you ErnSheong.com readers! Cooliris is a company founded in 2006 with the mantra “Think Beyond the Browser.” Their headquarters are in Menlo Park, California, and their team consists of seasoned developers, entrepreneurs, and Stanford computer engineers.

Enhance your browsing performance with Cooliris!
The two core products of Cooliris are (free features):

1) Cooliris

With Cooliris, you can preview images, videos and weblinks without clicking, turn on the slideshow mode for Google and Yahoo images, instantly email links, prefetch websites for faster previews, customize preview activation method and themes, as well as enable/disable previewing on custom list of sites. It works on any website, blog or forum.

2) PicLens

PicLens enables you to view photos in full screen mode, search for web images, play a slideshow of image search results and photo albums, multi-page search on Google Images and Yahoo Images, have multilingual full-screen search, as well as jump from PicLens to corresponding webpage. With a Mac, you can sit back and explore photos with the Apple® remote.

PicLens works on Social Networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5 and Friendster, Image Search Engines such as Google Images, Yahoo Images, Ask Images, Live Images and AOL Images, and Photo Sites such as Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa Web Albums, DeviantArt, and Smugmug.

Review: Cooliris can be quite annoying sometimes because when you hover over a link, a small Cooliris icon pops out. If you hover over it accidentally, a small window pops out, which is unwelcome especially when it is done unintentionally. But you can always turn the feature off by clicking the ‘tick’ at the bottom right of the page. PicLens is just plain cool. Very nice feel when searching images. A MUST TRY add-on to your web browser.

Source: cooliris.com

I would like to feature two applications which are currently found on ErnSheong.Com.

ShoutMix

The first is ShoutMix, the free chat widget proudly brought to you by a Malaysian named Tan Wei Heng. Tan started out with a passion to provide the best free shoutbox. In his words, “It started from my own enthusiasm on crafting shoutboxes. It was running great until it was at about 11 months old with 20,000 shoutboxes.” With the help of yet another Malaysian web hosting company, Exabytes Network, Tan managed to continue hosting ShoutMix and eventually moved on to create a premium service for ShoutMix so that ShoutMix would be self sustainable. More here.

Nuffnang

The other is Nuffnang, which is Asia’s first and leading blog advertising community. To date, more than 13,000 blogs have signed up with Nuffnang’s platform in Singapore and Malaysia. Nuffnang’s platform allows advertisers to serve graphic or video based advertisements onto the thousands of local blogs that are signed up with them. Nuffnang is proudly brought to you by Timothy Tiah and Cheo Ming Shen, a Malaysian and a Singaporean respectively. Thousands of bloggers have been served ads by numerous bluechip companies, such as Nike, Citibank, Nokia, F&N, Walls, AirAsia, Honda, and many more. Read more here.

And as the About-Us page on Nuffnang.Com says at the end, “The Best Is Yet To Be” for Malaysian entrepreneurs. Rock on!

Be a volunteer for this large scale event! Featuring industry leaders in ICT, including top CEOs and Heads of State from various regions.

Quoted from http://www.wcit2008.org/About/default.aspx

Held once every two years, the World Congress on Information Technology is a premier global ICT forum that brings together global leaders in business, government and academia. Often billed as the Olympics of ICT, it impacts global economic and social development through the exchange of policies and ideas on technology.

WCIT 2008 will be held at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre on May 18 – 22, 2008. Themed “The Global Impact of Information and Communications Technology: Enable Businesses, Empower Societies, Enrich Economies”, the five-day event is expected to draw more than 2,500 delegates from over 80 countries. Keynote speakers are expected to include some of the most respected and admired names in Government and industry.

WCIT 2008 incorporates a three-day congress to address global impact issues, a Link Program for business matching that includes a series of structured business-to-business (B2B), business-to-government (B2G) and business-to-industry (B2I) meetings, an ICT exhibition, a debate on current ICT issues and ancillary activities like tours, golf tournament, F1 experience and a spouse program.

It will cost a delegate USD 950 to attend, which translates to RM 3325 per delegate!!! For day-dreamers who want to rub shoulders with the industry’s greats like Michael Dell and Bill Gates, volunteering is your next best option!

So go and volunteer now!

- FAQ for volunteers
- Terms and Conditions
- Volunteer Online Form