It’s not often I get to write about 2 topics I’m deeply passionate about, politics and technology. So when I got wind that my very own government (whom I voted against by the way) spent nearly USD600k on a facebook page you can imagine how I blew my top. Now let’s be honest, RM1.8 million isn’t going to make Malaysia bankrupt but it does represent huge amount of government expenditure into something that cost peanuts to develop.

Notes.io is a great simple online app that allows you to store your notes in a quick online interface. Of course you’re wondering why you’d need a note taking app when you carry your iPhone or Blackberry all over the place, but notes.io offers a couple of cool nifty features that make it quite practical.

Google just added appointment slots to their online Calendar in their quest to successfully emulate MS Outlook on the cloud. Quite frankly, Googles getting pretty good, I can organize my whole life online and now with appointment slots I can allow people to book my time online, just like they would do with a MS Outlook Meeting Request.

For those of us who miss the good ol’ days of pen and paper though (like me!!), there’s a spectacular app that does just the calendar bit and nothing else. It’s call coolendar and it’s really cool (pardon the lame pun)

Nathan Yau, the guy over at Flowing Data (an amazing blog),  recently posted about a website called tweetolife that allowed you visualize tweets by either gender or by hours. So for instance a simple check on the word ‘shopping’ allows you to see what words were most associated with shopping on every tweet sectioned out by gender. For instance Men are more likely to tweet about shopping portals, or amazon or cash. While women are more likely to tweet about dresses or their parents (weird!). The data itself isn’t complete but it does let you kill about 10 minutes of your time trying to figure out the twitter universe. I had a fun time looking at the differences between men and women, confirming my suspicions and creating doubt in some others.

A lot of people seem to think that you can get away with loading files into public space and that no one will see them until I send someone a link.

That’s WRONG!!

You’re probably wondering, what Anne Hathaway(pic) has to do with applying for the same job twice. Well more than you might think. Read on for more.

Should you apply for the same job….twice!!

A lot of people think you’re either an entrepreneur or an employee, but whether you own your own company or work for one, you’re both. However, with the recent economy both state-side and in europe (greece,portugal,spain,iceland), some employee-minded people are finding it tough to get jobs.

Over here in Malaysia the job market seems to be picking up, but even then you never know what might happen. Starting up side projects that have little to do with your career path could be an answer to these problems, my wife use to run an online makeup retailer called simply-naturale.com. I’m starting up a new project called jomlunch, over at jomlunch.com. While these are all still new, I believe starting up projects is one of the best learning opportunities you’ll get.

Facebook has a 5000 Friend limit, meaning you can’t have more than 5000 facebook friends, and once you hit this limit Facebook won’t let you have any more friends.

Being an excel guru, I knew that older versions of excel had a 65,536 row limit per worksheet. That meant you couldn’t store more than 65,536 rows in excel, the geeks among us would recognize 65,536 as a 2 raised to the 16th power, so the number itself suggest it’s a system limitation that prevented excel from exceeded 65,536 rows. Facebook on the other hand has a very nice round number of 5000. That suggests that is was  a very careful design consideration to limit the number of friends you have rather than some database limitation. Personally I don’t even have 1,000 friends so it’s unlikely to bother me, but it did bother quite a number of people who now have turned to fan pages to broadcast their message on facebook.

According to the LinkedIn blog, LinkedIn that ever popular ‘professional’ facebook like thingy now has more members than the population of Australia, Malaysia, Singapore combined. LinkedIn has grown to a more niche social network that proves Facebook isn’t the only kid on the block, and niche networks like LinkedIn do have a future, for instance we’re more likely to search for a job/talent via LinkedIn than via facebook, and for the most part it’s probably better to keep our social (facebook) and professional (linkedIn) lives separate.