Great! Now I can move on to other matters and try to get back to blogging which I’ve been ignoring for so long. Got to update all those old plugins with new versions and got to clean up the spams on my blog. I forgot when was the last day I login to my blog to clean up spam.

Oh Yes!, I have a lot of Animes to catch up too. I’m following this 3 new animes. I got about 4 episodes each and I think I like 07-Ghost for good actions and Hanasakeru Seishounen for cute character profiles. I’m just downloading Tears to Tiara for the sake of utilizing my bandwidth but it seems to be pretty fun to watch and hell lotta blood for an anime. The blood and slashing are like those in 300 movie. Ok may be not.

Other day, I had a short conversation with a Japanese friend and when I mentioned I’m crazy about animes and manga, he told me to check out some of his manga. May be I’ll go borrow some manga from him later. I’ve never read a paper based hard copy manga yet as I’m only reading online versions. I at least like to feel the touch of good old manga book. I’m currently reading Shinobi Life (read), My Babaric Girlfriend/Yours and My Secret and Skip Beat (read | watch)

Every now and then I enjoy checking out friends’ photos on facebook and accepting new friends invites. I’m not sure they even know me at all, cos’ I only know about 10 people on facebooks and the rest are new faces for me; yet it’s no harm accepting/making new friends and I enjoy checking out their lovely photos. It calms me down during my busy days to see happy faces which kind of make my day enjoyable.

I haven’t been reading any of my feeds except 2 or 3 daily updates and I’m also ignoring tweets for a while now. Surely I’m behind on a lot of things so gonna catch up soon. I notice my Fiji friends are also not updating much on their blogs. Heard Zatlite is too lazy to blog but I think he tweets regularly. A friend at Lunch in Suva is making some $ for retirement plan while over investing on lunch menus. I’m not sure Sarnil is updating his blog or just his feed acting up cos’ I got all his old posts show up as new on my reader. The failed paradise guys are also very quiet these days. I always love the photos of A letter home from Meg C. I think Digital Fiji switches from blogging to twittering as I see a lot more tweets than posts. Ofcos’ the only blog with regular updates would be Ocenic and the posts are always very informative. I ignored all news blogs as I’m sure there is never been a good news to read lately.

There are 1000+ new posts on my Myanmar Blogs folder and I don’t even want to open any of the folders with 1000+ new updates; may be I’ll go through them slowly later. But I saw a lot of good work done by Ko Soe Min with the help of Ko NLS on their font and various projects. I’m amazed that he’s such a great programmer and thankful that he’s investing his precious time on such projects. I also hope that I can be like him one day and provide my knowledge for betterment of MM community. For now, I don’t have that much knowledge and time to apply to such projects so I can only concentrate on things that can put bread rice on the table. Like Zatlite once said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what’s for dinner“, or something like that, I forgot the exact phrase he used.

Just now I reassured my uselessness and reconfirmed that I AM A BAD DAUGHTER, after a short lunch time talk with a colleague. Everyday mum made a Bento in the morning for us and at lunch time when my colleague asks what’s for lunch, I don’t have an answer for it unless I open my lunch box and check for it first. As usual, today I didn’t know what my mom packed for lunch so couldn’t answer my colleague. He noted that I never help with cooking and I sleep while mom wakes up early to cook for Bento. He commented that I must have a pretty good life and indeed I have a very worry free life and am a very bad daughter as I hardly help with house work or cooking.

I do really appreciate my mom hard works and thinking of treating her some good lunch this weekend to celebrate Mothers’ day. I have this craving for Daikuku’s Special BBQ stake meal which is $45 per serve and a dish of Sashimi. I think I’ll have to order about 3 stake serves to fulfil my bottomless pit enjoy with my mom.

Alright, that’s all for now on my unrelated thoughts and a quick blog update. Hope you all have a good week.

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Last weekend while I was changing Zatlite’s blog template, I thought of adding a contact page for him. Blogger/blogspot blogs don’t allow editing server side scripts so you can’t really add an email contact form and such but ofcos there’s always many tricks to go about. Some bloggers use Kontactr or Zoho contact form scripts. They require a registration to their site and have to put up a power by logo on your form. I’m too lazy to register so never really tried those out but chose an easier way to add a contact form on blogger using my favorite Google Forms.

Google Forms are just so easy to create and everything can be done in your google account. Here are brief steps to add a Google form as blogger contact form.

• Go to http://docs.google.com,
• Click New > Form (or) From Template option,
• Enter form title and brief description, then add your form fields; make some required fields.
• Under “See responses” button, you can check form “Summary” or “Spreadsheet” where the submitted data is stored.
• You can grab the embedded code under “More actions” > “Embed” option or add a proper form submit confirmation message by clicking “Edit Confirmation” option.
• Live form can be viewed by clicking the link at the bottom of the page. That’s the link you send to your friends too.
• Create a new post, eg. “Contact me”, on your blog; choose HTML view, paste the embedded code in; publish your post.
• If you want to move your contact post from the first page, just change the publish date to earlier dates and the post will be hidden then you can link it from your menu

Once you’ve created your form, you need to know when the user submit to your form as soon as the submission is done. To do that, go to the related “Spreadsheet” by clicking “See responses” > “Spreadsheet” option from the Edit Form page or go directly from your google documents page. Click on “Share” blue button dropdownlist, click “Set notification rules” option. Set the rules as required and you are all set.

Ofcos’ the bad side of having Google form is that, you can’t style the text-boxes, the width are all the same. Well…maybe you can if you read through documentation or something but I’m too lazy to do that so may be some other time. And also it does not protect your form from spammers. There’s no CAPTCHA or nothing; hence only good to use it on small/starter blogs. Zatlite blog doesn’t have many visitors/hits yet so he won’t get much spams; and I don’t really care if he gets spams either. I’ve done my work of adding contact form, the rest is up to him. If you want those contact forms with CAPTCHA then try those two mentioned above.

A few more idea to make good use of Google Form is that, having a post suggestion form on your side bar or a small site survey form etc. Here is a small suggestion for Myanmar Blogs Directory blogs to make use of Google Form. Instead of letting people leave their blog links for submission in the comment form, it’s good to have a proper form to collect the blog information such, “Blog Name”, “Category”, “Blogger Name”, “Brief Description” etc. Create a nice form and embed the code in the side bar or in a new post and start collecting new blogs information in a neat excel sheet which can later easily exported into a proper database if they plan to create a searchable directory. Oh well, just my worthless 2cents.

There you have it, give it a try won’t you?. And do share your ideas/how you use google docs too.

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His very first blog, “The private life of a badminton maniac“, talks about all his passion on racquet sports, especially badminton and racquet breaking hobbies. I’ve posted some of his actions on the past Badminton games in this post and; photos and videos of his squash tournament here.

I’m sure he’s no stranger to mayvelous’s regular followers as he is mentioned many times in my posts. He has also written a few posts on mayvelous: KISS My Arse!, bugs and fixes posts.

Zatlite – “the guy in spotlight”

You can see some of his ramblings in these posts: A Corn Seed Story , Bulldozer, April Fools, Sister Hiring Hitman, and more under “Family“, “Brothers and Sisters“, “Conversation” categories.

Zatlite competes in Badminton games

Zatlite strips and plays Tennis too!

And he also plays Squash and broken 3 rackets.

So, Zatlite, the great “Genius Sama” (that’s what he calls himself), has started blogging about his antics on The private life of a badminton maniac“.
Do check it out and roll him along. You won’t get bored I assure you.

P.S. That’s it dude, I’ve introduced you quite well haven’t I? Now, go do my dishes!

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Indonesian Bloggers are having the 2nd national gathering next month on the November 22nd, last year we managed to get 500 bloggers from all over Indonesia to come.

This year hopefully we can get up to 1000 bloggers to attend the whole day event. The theme for this year is blogging for society.

Leading to that, as a part of the program to promote Indonesia tourism, supported by Indonesian Ministry of Cultural and Tourism, we would like to invite several international bloggers from any country to come and have a trip to three cities (Bali, Jogjakarta, Jakarta) in Indonesia leading to the event.

We are looking for bloggers (travel bloggers) that can post their experience, photos, people they meet, basically blogging about Indonesia and Indonesian people, and join the event.

The period for this trip is between Nov 17 – Nov 22 2009 and this is the itinerary:

1. Denpasar, Bali (Mon, Nov 17 – Tue, Nov 18)
2. Jogjakarta (Wed, Nov 19 – Thu, Nov 20)
3. Jakarta (Fri, Nov 21 – Sat, Nov 22)

All expense will be covered, including flight ticket from your country to Indonesia and back.

And read more about the event in detail below. Their site is fully in Indonesian language but this is from email attachment and it’s in English, so dumping it directly here.

Pesta Blogger 2008: The blogging trip

We’re looking for travel bloggers to come to Indonesia!

ABOUT PESTA BLOGGER
On October 27th, 2007, history was created when Indonesia had its first national bloggers gathering. PESTA BLOGGER 2007 attracted the participation of more than 500 prominent bloggers and blogger’s communities from throughout Indonesia. It also received the full backing of the Minister of Communications and Informatics, Muhammad Nuh, as well as securing reams of coverage in the traditional media.

The gathering, with a theme of ‘Suara Baru Indonesia’ and held at Blitz Megaplex, Grand Indonesia, served as a social get-together for bloggers to meet each other face-to-face and to share common interests. In his opening speech, Indonesian Minister of Communications declared October 27th as National Bloggers Day–to commemorate the 1st national scale bloggers’ gathering in Indonesia.

We have received very positive remarks and feedback of the event; that not only Pesta Blogger 2007 became the 1st get-together for bloggers nationally, but the event also had successfully helped many of Indonesia’s prominent bloggers to share their views and discuss how they can do something positive for the society.

In May, we posted an announcement in our official blog (pestablogger.com) that this year’s Pesta Blogger will be on this November 22, and have received hundreds of enthusiastic comments from bloggers across Indonesia, indicating that this event has become an annual celebration they’ve been waiting for. In 2008, Pesta Blogger will carry the theme “Blogging for Society”, whereby bloggers will demonstrate what positive contributions the blogosphere can make toward society and the nation in general.

THE BLOGGING TRIP: Are you a travel blogger?
Pesta Blogger 2008 will begin with a “Road to Pesta Blogger 2008” event on Nov 17, leading up to Nov 22, 2008. During this event, with the full support of Indonesia’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and in accordance with the program Visit Indonesia Year 2008, we’re planning to invite foreign travel bloggers (or other bloggers who habitually write about travel/tourism) from 5 countries to join a blogging trip— whereby these foreign bloggers will be exposed to Indonesian tourism potential, hosted by local bloggers’ community.

The blogging trip schedule is as follows:
1.Denpasar, Bali (Mon, Nov 17 – Tue, Nov 18)
2.Jogjakarta (Wed, Nov 19 – Thu, Nov 20)
3.Jakarta (Fri, Nov 21 – Sat, Nov 22)

All expenses for this trip (transportation, accomodation, F&B, etc.) will be covered by Pesta Blogger 2008 and The Ministry of Culture and Tourism. If you are a travel blogger (or a blogger who habitually writes about travel/tourism) from Singapore, Malaysia, China/HongKong, Australia, and USA and is interested to participate in this program, all you need to do is to send us an email containing your:

• full name (as written on your passport),
• country of origin,
• gender,
• age,
• phone number,
• email address,
• blog URL, and
• a short paragraph on why you’d like to participate in this blogging trip.

Don’t forget to put PB08-BLOGGING TRIP as the subject of your email.

We will wait for your email until October 22, 2008, and we’ll announce the 5 selected participants on October 24, 2008 through pestablogger.com. Throughout the trip, you’ll be expected to blog about Indonesia as a travel destination and the cultural heritage of the country as well as the interaction you’ll be having with local bloggers’ communities in Denpasar, Jogjakarta, and Jakarta. The trip will end up with the Pesta Blogger event in Jakarta, on Saturday, Nov 22, 2008.

For further information please contact:
Enda Nasution. | Email: enda.nst@gmail.com | YM: enda_001 | +62 813 9487 1625

Well, great news isn’t it? Indonesia is a great country with excellent hospitality, I’m sure you’ll make the best of this event and enjoy the stay.

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I don’t normally roll all commenters’ blogs but ofcos’ those I’m interested in only. (Well I do roll a lot of not so interesting blogs as well just for the sake of tracking news for GV). Here are the things that make me want to roll these guys’ blogs. First impression counts seriously.

“Geek Dreams” got me with this dashing green frog. Where was he from again? hmm I think I’ve seen him on Sesame Street or something…There’s not much information in the “About” page but I did a bit of looking around and thought this guy must be someone linked to Paradise Not Found gang since he links to one of the members from the Paradise Not Found.

He also got some interesting posts about the concerts he went to and how he got IPhone etc. But the thing that make me laugh was this post where he gone crazy over Chris Martin’s hand gesture.

Woooohoooooooo!!!!! Oh my fucking god chris martin waved at me!!! Feel like a giddy school girl right now!! He saw me!!!! He saw me!!!! He waved back!!!!! Chris martin waved!!!! Don’t care if u call me crazy..chris martin waved at me!!!

There he really cracks me up. Obviously he seems crazy about Chris Martin, I wonder what he would do if Chris Martin shakes hand with him. Now that something I like to see. Alright, good enough, rolling now.

First impression on “Geek What” is that the site look pretty neat and informative. You can see his photo and a short intro on the header. Ok, seem like we are in the same age and somewhat similar tastes, he got my attention from there. He got pretty good write up on “About” page too, you get to understand more about the blogger. Anyways, I checked his about page only after I rolled his blog. I rolled him straight after checking out his very first vlog post. Actually I was thinking of trying out vlogging as well after reading much about citizen media and video blogging posts on GV and Raising Voices. So I thought, so this person just started it, I might as well learn some stuffs from him like what kind of thing he vlogs about blar blah. And I go click, click and there he is…

So what do you think? He accomplished his 1st vlog splendidly didn’t he, he did make people smile, at least I smiled, no, I LOL. I had a great laughing at his video. Actually I rewind and watched it 3 times (serious!) and every times he never failed to amuse me. That’s it, he got me with this one video, I just have to roll you boy. LOL

It’s a pity, I couldn’t see comment box on the post. I guess my Firefox Adblock Plus must have blocked it. He uses some kind of comment system and I can only see that on IE.

Do check his vlog post as well, the write up is fun too. I hope he doesn’t mind me embedding his video here.

Alrite that’s it I guess.

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• In Arabic: حرية pronounced as: Hurriyah, Hurriyah (or Houria) is a very popular name in Morocco as well
• In Turkish: özgürlük or hürriyet. While they mean the same thing, the first one is more “Turkish” in its etymology and the second is a borrowed version of the Arabic.
• In italian: Libertà
• In Malagasy it’s Fahafahana (pronounced as it’s spelled). It’s also my favorite folk song in Malagasy . French speakers will probably weigh in soon but if you are in a hurry, it’s Liberté.
• In Chichewa it’s: Ufulu.
• In Chinese : 自由 in Chinese (pronounced: zi you)
• In Japanese: 自由 The same characters as the chinese, and the pronunciation is close too: Jiyu
• In Danish: “Frihed”
• In Norwegian: “Frihet”
• In German: “Freiheit”
• In Esperanto: “Libereco”
• In Dutch: vrijheid
• In Spanish (Español): Libertad
• In Portuguese: Liberdade
• In Catalan: Llibertat
• Askatasun – Basque
• In Malay: “KEBEBASAN”. used in brunei, malaysia and indonesia. ke-bay-bus-an in pronunciation
• In Macedonian: Слобода
• In Albanian: Liri
• In Tamil: விடுதலை. Pronounced Viduthalai. In Hindi – pronounced Swatantrata
• In Hindi: स्वतंत्रता. pronounced Swatantrata
• In urdu: آزادی – pronounced Azadi
• In Bangla (Bengali): স্বাধীনতা (Swadhinata)
• In Mapudungun: Kidunguneun from Mapuche language.
• In Serbian: Sloboda
• In Hebrew: חופש . Interestingly enough, it comes from the root – חפש – which means “search” or “in search of”
• In Russian and Ukrainian: свобода – svoboda –
• In Persian: Azadi
• In Filipino: Kalayaan
• in Khmer (Cambodia): Serey Pheap.
• # [Updated] #
• In Fijian: Galala – Thx Naomi for the word. See Ian’s comment below for more detail.
• In Welsh: ‘rhyddfreiniau’
• In Tumbuka: wanangwa
• In Finnish: vapaus
• In Lithuanian: laisve or valia
• In Latvian: briviba
• In Estonian: vabadus
• In Polish: wolnosc or swoboda
• In Swedish: frihet

Quite a diversity in GV don’t you think? Anyways, after that much of replies have been posted from various authors, I realized that I haven’t replied in Burmese yet. So I quickly flick through my brain and found out that I forgot (seriously!) how to say “Freedom” in Burmese. Embarrassing! I asked my brother and he asked me back, “What freedom?, What are you talking about?”. May be he also forgot the word or don’t understand what I’m asking, he just brushed me off like that. So I asked some random Burmese onliners on my gtalk. I simply asked “How do you say freedom in Burmese?” What’s the Burmese word for Freedom?”

Me: how to say Freedom in burmese? is that loot lat yay? loot lat yay is independence right. what’s the burmese word for freedom?
X: may be ” it can do as you like in leagally & it can get all equally chances” I think friend..
Me: no, i dont want english meaning. I want Burmese word
X: so what? okok
Me: i forgot the word
X: it may “lute lat mhu” pot bya
Me: loot lut mhu or yay? lute lat mhu….ic ok thx
X: but in legally nor you must careful in that.
Me: i dont know those, i just forgot the burmese word so asking anyways. that’s all

I don’t know what/how he understand my simple question but he started talking about legality and illegality issues and showing the sign of warning in his words. I was a little annoyed about the sensitivity of the word “Freedom” and how Burmese people take extra care to speak of it; I just don’t want to listen to him anymore so quickly say thanks and left him. But I still wasn’t convinced with the word he mentioned so I asked another friend. Here is what he said:

May: bro, sorry to bother u
Y: hi, nope
Me: i forgot burmese word, how do u say Freedom in Burmese?
Y: long tim no see လြတ္လပ္ေရး?
Me: loot lat yay or loot lat mhu? yay? mhu? confused
Y: its depends, both are noun
Me: true, ok thanks bro
Y: sometime its even say လြတ္ေျမာက္ျခင္း
Me: ok cool, i’ll note that as well
Y: you can write မႈ or ျခင္း or ေရး , its depend on that sentence
Me: yep
Y: writing some articles?
Me: ah…a friend asked how it called n I forgot the word
Y: ah, i see

So…..the word “Freedom” in Burmese is လြတ္ေျမာက္ျခင္း (Loot Myout Chin) or လြတ္လပ္ေရး (Loot Lat yay) or လြတ္လပ္မွဳ (Loot Lat Mhu) depending on the sentence.

If you ask – What’s my point here? No point! I was asked to think about the word, I thought about it, turned out that I forgot the word, I asked around and now I got it. I’m a bit ashamed of myself for forgetting so I’m not posting it on the list but noting it down along with the word in other languages.
THE END.

P.S: I gotta ask how does it call in Fijian.

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Follow GVSummit08 @: IRC | @gvsummit08 | Presentation Slides | Photos | #gvsummit08 | Summize | Alternate Coverage.

Live Streaming
Live .TV show provided by Ustream

Session 1: “Web 2.0 Goes Worldwide”
Moderator: Lova Rakotomalala | Live Blogger: Rebecca Wanjiku

Session 2: “The Wired Electorate in Emerging Democracies”
Moderator: Solana Larsen | Live Blogger: Juliana Rotich

Session 3: “When Biases Meet Biases”
Moderator: Xiao Qiang | Live Blogger: Rebecca

Session 4: “Translation and the Multilingual Web”
Moderator: Portnoy | Live Blogger: coming soon

Session 5: “When the World Listens”
Moderator: Preetam Rai | Live Blogger: Rebekah Heacock

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Free .TV show from Ustream

Session 1: “Toward a Global anti-censorship network”
Moderator: Helmi Noman | Live Blogger: Jillian York

Session 2: “Citizen Media and Online Free Speech”
Moderator: Mary Joyce | Live Blogger: Juliana Rotich

Session 3: “Living with censorship”
Moderator: Awab Alvi | Live Blogger:

Session 4: “Frontline Activists meet the Academy: Tools and Knowledge”
Moderator: Ethan Zuckeman. | Live Blogger: Juliana Rotich

Session 5: “NGO’s and on-the ground activists: Defending the Voices”
Moderator: Xiao Qiang. | Live Blogger: Rebecca Wanjiku

You can answer polls, drop comments and questions in the live blog. Jillian York, Renata, Juliana Rotich are managing it very well and are very fast typists. Thank you all for the excellent work. And ofcos whoever managing the live stream, thanks a lot too.

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What I would like to request from you is quite quite quite easy: if you have a youtube channel of your own, subscribe to our GVVideo YouTube channel, and let’s share the visits and content. If you don’t have a YouTube account, please just stop by and watch some videos and comment online. Also, if you know someone from your region who is creating awesome citizen media content in video, please contact me, or better yet, tell them to subscribe or send a video response to my vlog posts and I´ll be watching their channels for great content. If you stop by and have any ideas of how to make the channel a better and more inviting place, how to showcase content better, etc, please feel free to write me, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Please subscribe to Video GV if you are interested in GV activities and also the citizen media around the blogosphere.

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Anyways, just now I was browsing my feeds and this post, “Japanese Firm Offers Heartache Leave“, from Mr Trump really cracked me up. Well it’s not funny but somewhat makes me laugh, and think for sometimes.

I wasn’t surprised when I found out that all the employees at this company are women. I don’t mean to be sexist, but I don’t know many men who would call in sick to work because they broke up with their girlfriend.

Are you sure about that? What do you, guys, think? Don’t give me those man’s pride excuses and bluff about it.

But then I don’t know many women who would do it either. If you’re serious about your job, you don’t let heartbreak or store bargains keep you from doing your work.

I wonder our lives only exist around our jobs. He must be talking about those workaholics who got no life of their own and think only about work. It’s understandable since the billionaire such as Mr. Trump, who always think of how to increase his enterprise and who can get(or ditch) any women anytime without much effort would think work more important than other matters.

For me, I think if I ever get a serious heartbreak (I wish not), I wouldn’t want to do anything for sometimes. But then that’s all depends on individuality and how serious you take your relationships as. But I bet most Asian tends to take relationships matter more serious than those of the westenners. I’m just speaking in general but then hey what do I know; so may be not.

But I must say, that Japanese company is very considerate about their staffs well being. I’m sure the staffs appreciate about it and would boost their motivation to work harder for the company.

It’s a nice read for my morning tea break. Makes me think.

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The guys are running a little competition for free T-shirt give away. All you have to do is email them your wittiest slogan to best describe their blog. Check out the design samples below and read about the competition rules and stuffs on their post entry.

I want one of those…wittiest slogan huh? Hmm…I’m not good at that. The due date is 1st Feb so I still got time; lets see if I can think of something by then. Well I’m just passing on the word for your chance to win one of those Tees. Geez I sounded like one of those Ads from TV.

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Bro: Do my dishes for me today.

Me: I was gonna ask you the same thing. Why are you always copying me? Come to think of it, you always copy me and follow whatever I do.

Mom: That’s right. He always follows you around when you were young. He repeated whatever you say and always following you. Lucky, he didn’t wear skirt but went for pants. LOL

Me: That’s right. Back in school too, you used all my books to study.
You took the same subjects as me.
You went to the same Uni as me.
You graduated with the same degree like me.
Now we work in the same company, doing the same thing!!
What’s wrong with you? Why are you always following me?

Bro: Hey, I’m not following you. I’m just treating you like a bulldozer.
Don’t you know in Chess, the pawns go in front and cover for the king.
The same thing applies here. I’m just using you to clear my path.

Me: You little!! @#$%#@$%#*!!!

Moral behind the talk: Being the eldest is such a pain especially with these kind of bad mouth siblings.

Regarding the matter of pawn and chess, I just read that the guys from Failed-Paradise were also cracking up about Chest and Porn.

I love the slogan for geek T-Shirt idea proposed by Digital Fiji.

“We are not chest porns to be played around with.”

There you go, I’m not your chest porn nor I the bulldozer. haha.
I’ll just wait and see how the designs come out as. Whoever wear them, go around in town and take some photo of yourself. If you’re lucky, your pic might even get into the next day Fijitimes post; otherwise you can always show off yourself on your blog.

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My two weeks trip was exciting, tiring and a great fun. I met lots of new faces and visited new places. It was a great experience for me. Couldn’t come back quickly cos’ I caught a cold after the trip due to too much excitements and weather changes; then my laptop screwed up and had to repair OS. Now everything is settling down so catching up on my feeds and blogging here.

I took lots of photos and a few videos of my two weeks stay at GC, Syd and Adelaide. The main event was ofcos’ GC Tech-Ed. It was my very first business related overseas trip. I thank my bosses and the company for giving me an opportunity to participate in such event. I met lots of geeks and super geeks at Tech-Ed. There were total of 2400 delegates made their mark at Gold Coast Tech-Ed this year. ~80% of them are male with very few female delegates, regardless of this year Tech-Ed having the most female participants compare to the previous years. I’m one of those very few female delegates and most of the time I found myself lost in the superiority and the geekiest air around them. I felt like disappearing when I have no idea what the geeks were talking about. Yet, I somehow found myself enjoying their conversations and was inspired by their intense knowledge and skills on various subject matters.

Here are some of the photos Sarnil and I took from the event.

Note: Lightbox enabled. (Click on the photo, hover over it to browse “Next” or “Previous”)

Surf Parade Apartment

We stayed at Surf Parade apartment which is about 20-30min walking distance from Gold Coast convention center and about 10min Bus ride. The room was very neat and well furnished – TV, fridge, oven, microwave, washing machine, in-room spa, etc. The view from the room was also great. Can see the beach and also the buildings from Surf Paradise area. The room costs around AUD 119 per night and ideal for two people but I stayed alone so quite a big room for me. There were heated swimming pool and tennis courts downstairs but I didn’t even have a time to peek at them. The whole day out and we only came back to our rooms after 9 or 10pm to sleep so we couldn’t check out the whole building and the surroundings.

Gold Coast City Views

There wasn’t much time for us to explore the city as our times were fully occupied inside the convention center. I found Gold Coast has many weird looking buildings, some having spiral type and some has alien style weird diamond shape in the middle. I didn’t see any building of my liking but overall the city is quite lovely and quiet.

Activities at Tech-Ed

There were lots of sessions to attend to and I had a hard time choosing them but Sarnil and I sorted out ourselves on which sessions we should attend and share them later. We couldn’t attend any hand-on-lab sessions because they were always too full. I sat one exam there but I didn’t make it. It was the very first failure in my exams history and I was very disappointed about it. I stayed 2 whole hours burning my head hard in the exam room; I missed one session and my lunch. I was so hungry and was mad at myself for the failure. Anyway what done is done and I’ll try that exam again later. So let just say, the exam was a hard one and I didn’t prepare well. Some of the sessions I attended are:

• WEB316 Ajax Patterns with ASP.Net
• DEV307 Developing Office Business Applications with Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office
• DAT302 Database Schema Versioning: How to Use Microsoft Visual Studio Team System for Database Professionals and Team Foundation Server to Version and Deploy Your Databases
• CON206 Custom Activities with Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation: A Developer’s Primer
• ARC307 Enterprise Library 3.1
• DEV308 A Lap around Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation
• DEV311 NET Framework 3.0 End-to-End: Putting the Pieces Together
• CON311 Building Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation Enabled Windows Communication Foundation Services in .NET Framework 3.5
• DEV320 Microsoft Visual C# Under the Covers: An In-Depth Look at C# 3.0
• OFC418 Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies 2007: Deployment and Advanced Administration Topics
• ARC312 Make your Customer’s Day: User First Design

I also attended the “Blogger Lunch” and here is one live post which covers pretty much everything about the session. I found out later in the “Ask the Expert” section that one of the Blogger Lunch session speakers, Darren Neimke, is in fact from Adelaide and live near Flinders University where my sister is studying.

One of the fun things about Tech-Ed was collecting stamps and freebies from exhibition stands. I collected a few pens, toys, a cap, a T-Shirt, a few evaluation product CDs and lots of information brochures. I also filled in lots of forms to place in the daily draws. There were some gift packs and good stuffs such as Xbox 360 draws everyday. My friend Robert won Xbox360 and we were very jealous of him. Such a lucky guy but he didn’t even invite us to play with him. Bad Robert!

There were tons of food and drinks at Tech-Ed; if you are a drinker, you would definitely love it. Coffee stands were always packed and I liked the breakfast donuts. Lunches and dinner were great too but for some reason I only ate lots of salad. I think it’s cos’ of different cooking style, their meat/main dishes didn’t taste good in my tongue.

Movie World Night

They booked the whole “Movie World” park for 2400 Tech-Ed delegates from 6:30 – 11pm on Thursday night. It was a great fun. We met one of the speakers and Sharepoint expert, Milan Gross, from Hawaii and team up with him to enjoy the night. We rode “Lethal Weapon” (roller coaster ride), “ScoopyDoo” ride, Batman stimulation and the Waterfall ride. I couldn’t believe I actually rode all of them and enjoyed it. I couldn’t have ride them if it wasn’t for the guys who kept pushing me to try so. Every ride I closed my eyes, shut my mouth and sit very still and stiffly so I didn’t get to see the high/dangerous views. But the feeling alone is scary enough for me. That was a great fun and we all enjoyed the night.

Evening at the Beach and Last Night Out

The final day closing note ended around 4:30pm and we rested a few min at our apartment. Then we paid our (my) first and final visit to the beach in front. It was lovely evening and we saw some surfers, walkers and swimmers there. We took some photos at the beach then went back to the apartment and waited our friend to go for dinner. The final night out was enjoyable. Conversation between Sarnil and Milan was interesting and amusing. They did the talking and I did the listening part as usual. We then had Korean BBQ for dinner and done a lot of walking around to digest the food. Actually the guys were searching for a good place to dance. I had a very early flight to catch and have to wake up around 4am in the following morning so I took an early leave, said goodbye to the guys and came back to the apartment. Then I packed my stuffs and get ready for Sydney departure in the next morning.

So Tech-Ed ended pretty well and some of Tech.Ed 2007 Statistics from lock note are:

• This year there were 89,608 teeth at Tech.Ed.
• You ate 12,628 bread rolls, and drank over 14,000 liters of enough coffee and Coke.
• And at MovieWorld, on the Superman ride, we recorded 1,216 cries of “shhh****tttt…!!!!”
• If all our Tech.Ed delegates were laid end-to-end, you’d stretch 4.15 kilometers long. But only an average of 1 meter wide. In most cases.
• If all this year’s delegates forms a conga-line, that would be the end of Gold Coast Tourism.

Interesting stats, aren’t they?

I was checking out the next Tech-Ed SEA 2007 at Kuala Lumpur 10-13 Sept and found out that there is one Burmese in the speaker list. The speaker name is “Maung Maung Phyo” and is a Senior Consultant from Singapore. He looks pretty young. Kuala Lumpur Tech-Ed got quite a few female speakers and most of them look very young. Also there are lots of Asian speakers. Impressive! Our friend “Milan Gross” is in the list as well. Being a Sharepoint expert, he got to travel a lot I bet.

Anyways Gold Coast Tech-Ed 2007 was great and I enjoyed it. Tech-Ed SEA 2007 looks interesting too so do share some words about it if any of you out there attending.

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Couldn’t blog long. Just dropping a line during session break. I’ll write about my Tech-Ed experiences very soon. At the moment, I’m at “Ask the Expert” session, and quickly posting this. I got one exam to sit tomorrow and couldn’t finish studying yet. Gotta cram tonight.

Anyways gotta run. Will post about things properly later. Tar.

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ငါ

ငါ့ မွာလည္း ငါ ၊ သူ ့မွာ ငါႏွင့္
ငါ့ ငါ သူ ့ငါ ၊ ေတြ ့ၾကခါ၀ယ္
ငါ ႏွင့္ ငါ ခ်င္း ၊ ငါ စစ္ခင္းလ်က္
ပူျပင္းလွ်ံရဲ ငါ ေပါက္ကြဲ၏ ။

ငါ ဒုကၡေပး ၊ ငါ မေအး၍
ငါ ေအးရေၾကာင္း ၊ ခြင့္ခါ ေခ်ာင္းလ်က္
ငါေကာင္းကို ရွာ ၊ ငါဆိုး ခြာေသာ္
ကြာေလသည္ သို ့၊ ျဖစ္သၿမိဳ ့လည္း
ေခါင္းလွ်ိဳ ့ကိုယ့္ေခြ ၊ ပျခဳပ္ေဗြ၌
ငန္းေျမြ မျခား ၊ ႏွဲသံ ၾကားလွ်င္
ပါးပ်ဥ္း ေထာင္လ်က္ ငါသည္ထြက္၏ ။

အို – ဖြားဖက္ ငါ ၊ အသင္ ငါႏွင့္
ငါ မေလွ်ာ့တမ္း ၊ အားအင္ စမ္းအံ့ ။
အစြမ္း သာသူ ၊ ပန္းဆြတ္ယူလိမ့္ ။
ငါမူ ငါ့ကုိ ေအာင္မည္ေလာ။ ။
ငါ့ကို ငါက ေအာင္မည္ေလာ။ ။

မင္းသု၀ဏ္
မတ္လ၊ ၁၉၈၂။
ရွဳမ၀ မဂၢဇင္းမွ

It’s pretty good poem but I’m confused over the last two stanza.
What I understand is:

“Nga” = Me
“Ngar” = Ego or noun in general

Most probably “Ngar” is your ego but for my own easy translation purpose, lets’ take it as someone, say “X”.
So….when I translate, (or this is how I understand)

The 1st line says:

Will X gonna win over ME? (or) Will your Ego win over You?

The 2nd line again says:

Would ME gonna be beaten by X? (or) Will You get beaten by your own Ego?

In both way, you loses. ie. ME loses, and both lines have the same meaning.

Shouldn’t be like

Will X gonna win over ME (Will your Ego win over You?) and
Will ME gonna win over X? (Will You be able to beat your own Ego?)

Ok now, how to write that in Burmese? Ngar Muu Nga Ko Aung Myi Law…
“Muu” is something like “Ka” rite? hmmm….

I think I understand what this poem is trying to say. I’m just being an annoyingly picky person sometimes. May be my whole understanding of the poem is wrong. Sometimes meaning of the poems are so hard to figure out but I still enjoy reading those kinds and try to understand their hidden meaning.

Translation of the poem is something like this. Actually I have no idea how to translate it properly. It’s not direct translation; I just made up some parts cos’ some are weird to translate.

Ngar (Self or Ego)

I have my Ego and you have yours,
When our Egos meet,
Both turn into a fight,
With volcanic destruction, they clashes.

Ego being the problem,
Think of a chance/way to resolve it,
Search for the goods, throw away the bads,
Though you try to discard it,
It will act as a sleeping cobra,
A note from a flute could arouse,
And turn him into a deadly weapon.

Oh – Ego my buddy, shall we,
Test our strength against will,
May the best one win,
Will you win over me?
Will I be defeated by you?

Min Thu Wun
March 1982,
Via: Shu Ma Wa Magazine.

Note: Is “Ngan Mway” a Cobra? or a Viper? or a Krait? I always confused over those snakes but I know it’s definitely not a Swan, “Ngan“. Oh Yes, I’m absolute sure sure. ahee

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