I used to be a strong believer of organics, until I saw the prices of organic foods at my local Jusco. Needless to say, I stopped believing in organics pretty quickly. Of course, I understand the premise, which is that organic food is 100% natural, without added chemicals or fertilizers, no herbicides or pesticides leaving your food 100% wholesome. There is strong justification for this, although limited scientific proof.

The way to think about organic is that, mankind evolved to consume certain types of food and nutrition, but with the advent of ‘industrialized agriculture’  things changed. We now consume tomatoes all year round, although it’s a seasonal fruit, the concept is simple–pluck the tomatoes when they’re ripe and then spray them with chemicals just before they hit supermarket shelves, that way nobody needs to worry about seasons. This is true for nearly all your seasonal fruits that appear ‘all year round’. All this makes the fruit un-natural or at least–less nutritious than it’s purely organic counterpart.

Just this morning I wrote about how my Unifi services went down and how I wrote a letter to what ‘appears’ to be Telekom Malaysias CEO email address.

A lot of Malaysians are skeptical that CEOs would actually respond to emails. Steve Jobs has responded to many emails personally and so has his successor Tim Cook. There have even been reports of Palm's CEO responding to customer query and even non-tech companies like home depot doing the same.

These however are American companies, not Malaysian, would a Malaysian CEO actually respond to an email from a small-time RM150/month customer like myself? I figured why not give it a try, I was already internet-less -- what more is there left to lose?

Last year I moved into my new place, and had to apply for Yes! broadband because my place wasn’t Unifi ready yet. I blogged about how much I enjoyed the Yes! experience and even recommended it to most friends and family. That little love affair however took a turn for the worst when I discovered Yes! would experience a service interruption nearly once a month and the overall design of the Yes! service was lacking. So in the end I parted ways with Yes! and subscribed to Unifi instead.

A couple of weeks back, Dreamhost reported a security breach on it’s servers, so I thought for security sake I should change my passwords as well. I’d been using the same password for the past couple of years and it was time for a change anyway.

However, as most of you will notice,  whenever you’ve just changed your password you instinctively try to re-enter the old one on your next login. This obviously prompts and invalid password prompt which should point you in the right direction. If you’re like me though, you end up thinking you typed it wrongly and try again, this can go on for a while and if you’re not careful you could lock yourself out of your account because you entered the ‘old’ password 3 times in a row.

A good piece of design I noticed from Google is that if you’ve changed your password recently, they actually remind you that you changed it and when you changed it. Thereby stoping your automatic response in it’s track and getting you to type the new one. Just a small piece of code and small feature but a rather good piece of design.

Yesterday, a doctor by the name of Sandra posted a comment on my blog about how she thought crowdsourcing could help disabled people particularly those with bipolar disorders get jobs online. If anyone in the crowd can contribute to a crowdsourcing initiative then even those with bipolar disorders should be able to do it, and they should be paid the same amount. It got me thinking about an article I read in the New York Times some months back on a non-profit startup called AspireTech was actually getting work for autistic adults not ‘despite’ them being autistic but because they were autistic. Autistic people are generally able to perform the same repetitive task over and over again without losing focus or getting lethargic, and they’re way more adapt at this than the rest of the general population.

This fundamental advantage they have makes them perfect for roles as software testers and even programmers. I always dread testing anything, especially when it’s doing the same thing over and over again, let try uploading a 5MB file, now a 10MB file, now a 100MB file…on and on and on. These test provide critical data for any software project but can be very very cumbersome to accomplish since they require repetitive work to be done over and over again with minimal variance. At least it’s hard for me to do, particularly since my wife says I’m not too good with instructions.Individual with autism are extremely adapt at this and they’ve proven their worth. In these areas autism is an asset not a liability.

According to a report from Channel News Asia, a total of nearly 200 DBS and POSB customers in Singapore have been hit by unauthorized withdrawals averaging S$1000 each. The withdrawals were done in Malaysia “while the ATM cards were with them safely in Singapore”. Which begs the question what does ‘safely in Singapore’ mean?

Channel News Asia goes on to report that withdrawals were made in Kuala Lumpur (not neighboring Johor Bahru) and done approximately the same time as ‘valid’ withdrawals. ZDNet has reported DBS is working together with its IT vendor, NCR to understand the issue and investigate further. It’s also suspended all suspected cards and are contacting customers to give them what it says would be a full refund. NCR also happen to make almost 90% of all ATMs in Malaysia, and according to Yahoo! news, this was “a security breach to its anti-skimming devices installed on ATM machines”, so I’m just wondering why this wasn’t done to Malaysian accounts of local banks? 

There’s been a recent surge of Anti-SOPA and Anti-PIPA sentiment over in the Unites States, Wikipedia blacked out it’s entire webpage and Google, Twitter and Facebook all joined in the fray. I’ve even received multiple emails from the Mozilla foundation on how to combat SOPA and recent a congratulatory cum Thank you note from Mozilla for joining the fight. Make no mistake, SOPA isn’t dead, it’s just been shelved for the time being, get ready people round2 starts soon.

In Malaysia though there has been little reporting on the issue, while some local blogs did mention SOPA, and a few newspapers briefly covered it, not much has been discussed on either of the laws. It’s typical of the Malaysian media to report less on matters that actually matter, and more on frivolous material like this article from the New Straits Times that read “Unity is Priceless: PM”. Really? Cause the rest of us thought Unity was worth around about Rm2.75 . I mean apart from pointing out the obvious, the article has absolutely no content, apart from the big picture with the “We Love the PM” nonsense.

That being said, there were a few articles on SOPA and PIPA, however those articles for censored to a certain degree, and here’s how.

Back in 2007, I had a n

ew year resolution to run 5km in 25 minutes, or more specifically to get my body in good enough shape to run 5km in 25 minutes. That was my aim, it was partly driven by some research I read that it’s better to have just 1 resolution and making that resolution specific rather than generic. So rather than, ‘I’ll exercise’, I needed a goal or a target to reach–and I chose the target of being able to run 5km in 25 minutes, because about 14 years ago, I ran 8km in 40 minutes at my high-schools cross country, and I thought 5km in 25 minutes was a pretty reasonable number to me.

Unfortunately, I didn’t accomplish my resolution in 2007, nor in 2008 or 2009, not even in 2010 and finally didn’t even jog in 2011.

So for the last 5 years, I’ve made just one new-year resolution and failed to accomplish it. That is a big FAILURE!!

or is it…..

I’ve posted a couple of post around SOPA and PIPA, and today there was a protest from one of the most web-traffic websites of all – WIKIPEDIA.

Wikipedia, today was blacked out to protest SOPA and now you know. Every college student looking to do a term paper, every high school student looking for information on a term paper and if you’re looking for just about anything online, you’re going to see a blacked out wikipedia– and so now you know about SOPA.

I basically live on Google servers, the first sites I visit when I wake up are Google Mail and Google Reader, without these two sites I’m basically lost. I seldom log on to facebook anymore and twitter may keep me occupied for about an hour, but after that I need my fix of Google. Google is such an integral part of our lives, in fact since 70% of my readers come here via a Google search, chances are you wouldn’t be here reading this very post right now–without Google.

The question then becomes how much do we trust Google? Have we really thought about trusting Google given how much we rely on it. Think about it if Google were to go down, where would you go for more information. Chances are you’d head on over to bing, take bing away and you start having problems.

How do you search for search engines, when you don’t know any??