I’m utterly annoyed by amount of spam mayvelous is getting everyday. If not for Akismet plugin, my blog will be bombarded with all those shitty spam comments. I can’t believe people have that much time in hand to send junks like that. Everyday Akismet catches about 200 – 400 spams for me. Whatever go into Akismet spam list, I just click once and delete them all. I don’t waste my time going through the list so it’s easy enough to clean them up. But lately, not only spams but they’ve been hitting me with track-backs.

The worst thing about track-backs is that they show up on my front page – recent comments list. If I don’t realize or forget to check the mail, all those filthy links will be showing up and spoiling my site. I’m not sure whether those people actually benefit from those kind of spamming other sites with shit load of junks. I wonder whether they do this to promote their business or doing just for fun and annoy others.

They chew up my bandwidth, mess up my stats, disgusted my site and most important of all, they really piss me off. I hope, whoever behind this, they rot in spam hell. One spam to my site, hope they get back 100 times more to their site and quickly bankrupt their rotten business!!!

I’m just here to post a note on awareness and familiarization of GV site. I’m sure some of you have already heard about this great news source site – Global Voices Online. In case if you haven’t, here is abit of info.

Global Voices Online is a non-profit global citizens’ media project founded at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, a research think-tank focused on the Internet’s impact on society.

Global Voices seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online – shining light on places and people other media often ignore. We work to develop tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices, everywhere, to be heard.

More info check out the FAQs section.

You may or may not notice that authors and editors from GV has been aggregating your sites and occasionally featuring/linking to your interesting posts. Those who have wordpress blogs will notice it quicker than those of blogger as there is a link tracking feature WP provides to detect the back links frequently. Ofcos’ you can always check Technorati for back-linking and tracking conversations.

GV is very search engines friendly site. The post published there will be on google search hit within an hour or so. That means, your link will get a bit of search branches and link bites. GV is also an internationally well known center for collecting news hence whatever featured on the site will reach to a vast medium of global readers.
At the moment, my regions of interest are:

East Asia (rather South East Asia) – Myanmar
[ Direct Page Link ] [ RSS ]

Oceania – Fiji
[ Direct Page Link ] [ RSS ]

Global Voices Online provides “RSS feeds” of all its content as it is posted to Country, Region and Topic sections.

Here is a list of feeds they roll for each region. [ GV feeds on Bloglines ]

I guess they haven’t updated the list for quite sometime now cos’ it is an old, incomplete compilation. They got only a few Myanmar feeds that time and no feed from Fiji in there. But ofcos each regional author has his own feed list. I have my own compilation for Myanmar blogs and also quite a few Fiji feeds. Due to last year coup in Fiji, many political blogs bloom up along with a few personal blogs. There is a good possibility of more Fiji blogs to come as awareness of blogging has been spreading through media – newspaper, forums, social networking and among youth groups.

The main difference between Myanmar and Fiji blogosphere is that, Fiji blogs are excelled in English; almost all of them post in English language with a few exceptions of Fijian language blogs. Where else for Myanmar blogosphere, a lot of new blogs emerge in Myanmar language and also some of the formerly English blogs are now transformed into native language blogs. Each has its own pros and cons; I won’t go farther into that.

Anyways, GV is starting to get interested in Fiji and South Pacific blogosphere as well as Myanmar Blogs. So if you find any interesting blogs/news from these regions especially from Myanmar, just give me a shout. The world is listening, so speak up your voices.

Alrite it’s very sleepy, sneaky, slimy, stupid kind of gloomy weather here at Suva today, plus it’s Friday evening so I’m getting bored typing this up. That’s all folks!

Oh Lunchers, your Lunch in Suva blog has already been noticed; how about that huh?

Over at WordPress.com, 3 new features have been added. Out of them, “Contact Form” features is very higly awaited feature and now it’s been out.

Here’s how: put

[contact-form]
in any post, and a simple contact form asking for the sender’s name, email address, website and comment will be inserted. When someone submits a message through the form, you receive that message in an email.

Other two include:
# Box.net Filesharing Widget
# More Slideshows

Personally, I don’t like slideshows so won’t be of much use for me but contact form is definitely a yes and the filesharing widget too. There are some more widget goodies under “Presentation Sidebar Widget” tab so check them out yarrh.

I’ve been tagged for “10 Weird Things About Me” post from MaMoe. Ten is quite a number to think up. May be I’m not weird at all, but when I ask my friend, she said everything about me is weird. Man, what is that suppose to mean? Anyways, the followings are ten weird things about me. (may be not)

1. I don’t like ice cream, chocolate and sweets. (ice cream sticky my mouth/fingers, chocolates stuck in the teeth, sweets are just too sweet)
2. Sometimes, I sleep with eyes open. (so mom says. Very rare ok!)
3. I pull my hair whenever I’m reading or into deep thoughts.
4. I bite my lip till it bleed.
5. I don’t own a single makeup or costmastic except lipstick (which I wear to prevent myself from biting lips).
6. I don’t like orange, I don’t like water melon or any other fruits that would wet/sticky my fingers. Not that I don’t like them, I just don’t feel like eating them.
7. I use tissue paper to hold my mouse. (Finger/palm got sweaty and it gets dirty and sticky which I hate very much)
8. Sometimes I don’t comb my hair or look myself in the mirror for the whole day. (Especially during the weekends)
9. Sometimes I talk/mumble to myself whenever I’m thinking or coding something.
10. Then again, I sometimes don’t talk at all to anyone for the whole day.

Ok so that’s about it for me and my weirdness. Now…who shall I tag?
I’m tagging…7venians, Klosayhtoo, CMS, Strange Pants and 50 Viss

My work mates “SSP“, “Strange Pants“, “Kiti” and “The Boss” team up to write a new blog called “Lunch in Suva“.

“Humans exchanging money for food in Suva between 1200 and 1430, and writing about it.”

It’s not a cooking/recipe blog, it’s about the lunches – the venue, menu, price and the verdicts. So just roll it along and for you next lunch, you can try out one of the places they mentioned.

It’s this time of the year again – Thingyan (water festival), so-called the joyest occation in Myanmar. For me it’s just boring…boring…boring.

It’s been a decade our family is away from Thingyan. We don’t celebrate proper Thingyan in Fiji as there are very few Myanmar families, most of them caring only about work and daily routines that they sometimes did not notice Thingyan at all. The best we could do for Thingyan is to make lots of food and send to friends’ places.

We came here since we were too young age, (Me – 13, bro – 11, sis – 7), that we don’t have much memories about Myanmar Thingyan. The only thing I remember was throwing water at neighbours and whoever pass in front of our house. About two, three times we went to play water at a mandut built by my dad’s ministry. Since we are too young, our parents only let us play for a few hours then we were to sit and watch the shows quietly. We didn’t have an experience of driving around in city to get soak or fooling around with friends. Our Thingyan were mainly about food and play water with friends for specific time frame. So we lack certain feelings yet this time of every year we miss Thingyan…just miss it, don’t know why.

I was gonna write properly about Myanmar Thingyan and the traditions for my foreign friends but I feel very lazy rite now. We got a lunch party today, so may be I’ll continue later. For now you can read Thingyan round up post I wrote for GV here: “This week on Myanmar Blogosphere: Myanmar Thingyan 2007″.

Anyways hope you guys have a wonderful time.
Happy Thingyan and Prosperous Myanmar New Year 2007!!!

Just informing my readers and the rest that I’ve been invited to join GlobalVoicesOnline.org site as a regional author for South East Asia – Myanmar.

Motto: The world is talking. Are you listing?
It’s been a while they sent me the invitation; since the crisis about my “Populating mmBlog Gene Pool” post last year. Due to the event, I’ve turn down the request that time. Myanmar blogs have been blooming with a great speed these days and most of them post in Myanmar language so GV team in need of someone who is bilingual to help out rolling Myanmar feeds. I’ve already been rolling hundreds of Myanmar feeds so not a problem for me to collect news from the community. So for this re-invitation, I’m accepting it.

I’ll make sure…Myanmar Voices shall be heard!