The 21st Century Outsourcing phenomena have reached a new personal level. In the last 10 years, companies have been outsourcing jobs to 3rd world or to a cheaper provider. This probably inspired Thomas L. Friedman’s book on this subject. Just early in the year, I blog about my wife’s job being outsourced. Now, outsourcing becomes personal. Companies like AskSunday.com or GetFriday.com can help you complete task that you are too busy to do. Too busy to buy flowers for your Girl Friend? AskSunday.com can help. These companies market their services as Online/Virtual Personal Assistance, which in fact, are outsourcing your task to them. UK university students have been outsourcing their coursework to India, and there’s a term to this, ‘Contract Cheating’. So, if you have outsource all your task away, what do you do with all the extra time? Go play Pachinko?

This is my third term with Hive.com.my and I am getting irritated with the hosting speed. Dont know why, of late, my site have been loading so slowly that I could not get it validated at Google Webmaster Tool. the site loads > 10s, while some of the other top sites like 5xmom.com only loads within 3s. She was on a dedicated server and not sure how much her host cost. Hive.com.my can be considered on the entry/budget level, with only USD40/year, you get 5Gb of space, 50Gb of transfer, a whole lot of stuff and one free domain. Best deal around. Technical response was also fast and reliable. But all these doesn’t mean much if the site takes forever to load. Everytime I clicks any button on my wordpress, it takes almost a minute to load. I was listerning to ‘Arigatou’ from Kokia and it was half a song before I get to the write post page. Tell me how I can tolerate this.

I have feedback to the technical team over at hive and they responded that the speed was normal from their end. They have also tried to move me to another server and still the same. So, if they can’t work it out for me, I will work it out with other host. Then again, moving host is like moving home, full with ordeals. So, if you are looking for a host, do ensure you want to stay with them for long, else, it is much hassle to migrate. Like all moving homes events, there are head aches at every steps. Hey, maybe there is a business for this, professional moving, where we do the work, you just relax at the beach or listen to your favorite tune without any worry. Once done, we will notify you of your new password, etc.. sounds like a plan…

 

Windows trash can that is. For a coffee lover, it couldn’t trill me more to have a trash can with the starbucks brand trash can, a constant reminder to get my java to fuel my day…Speaking of starbucks, I was required to travel next week to audit one of the newly setup factory in China. Considering which hotel to stay at, the first thing I did was went to google map, and search for the city’s name. Next I type in ‘Starbucks’, to search for business at the city. To my dismay, the city was not listed in Google map, to have this service, too small, so I stayed in Shangri la ShenZhen without any starbucks near by. Fear not, there are 13 starbucks stores in ShenZhen, a quick cap will do my fix.

Get your trash can here.

After using Wordpress for so long, I have got acustom of this CMS engine and grew out of Movable Type. My long standing photo blog which was previously powered by movable type have been migrated to wordpress. The migration was fairly simple, just export from MT and inport at Wordpress and it was done. I manage to tweak the 555 photoblog theme to customize it to my liking and what you see above is the fruit of my customization. In addition, I have also moved from /pblog to the root of my domain. So, now who ever comes to wekgna.com will first come to my photo blog, which fits into what I want to maintain of my personal existance on the web. When I first start blogging years back, I hate to write, and I only post photos, and hence the my photoblog was born. I was on blogspot then. I could still remember, I first subscribe to a free host 100mb that host perl, and movable type was free for all at that time. I name my blog Sweet & Sour, witih the notion that life is full of sweet and sour memories, and they are captured through my photos. After some revisions of movable type upgrade, wordpress starts to spring up on the side. I started to use wordpress out of curiousity and created my ‘blog‘ named ‘My So Called Life’ with wordpress. By that time, I started to write more and took photo less. As my ‘blog’ on wordpress grew, my photoblog powered by movable type starts to be neglected. I have also moved into my own new domain called wekgna.com, which is my name spelled backwards. Not untill a few days ago I tried to post a photo and found issues with movable type. I have upgraded to the latest version and it seams to be so much complicated. So, I decided to ditch movable type and migrate my entire photoblog into wordpress. This brings us here today to this post. I would like to annouce that my old photoblog at wekgna.com/pblog has been shutdown, and now moved to the root of the domain, which is www.wekgna.com. Enjoy the photos, and subscribe for new postings if you like my style of photography.

I bought this book mainly to find out what my strengths were. I was intreague by the method how the queries were structured. I have done many of these kind of personality finder and they often allows you to think of whats right and whats wrong and your answer were skewed. The book on the whole does not worth a dime for it. It was first published in 2001 and extremely outdated. This was just on the book version and not actually the content. The book helped me to identify and realize what my strengths were. To the purpose of the book, it was extremely useful and it serves the purpose well. However, after reading to the middle of the book, which calls the reader to go online to take the strengthsfinder.com test, I found out that there is a newer book, titled Strenghsfinder 2.0, with an updated version of test and a structured method of improvement. Of which this version of book severely lacks. This book only helps you to realize who you are and stop short on that. It encourages you to go improve, but provide no means of achiving that. Therefore, my summary of this book is to bypass it, and go to the next stop, which is the latest and greatest version of the book Strengthsfinder 2.0. Rating of 4 star out of 5 for the content of the book, while I encourage to get the later version.