Good spanking morning Malaysia! It's 10:48pm and I'm all pumped up and ready for a change.

No, I'm not going for some plastic surgery or anything like that. My change, although physical has nothing to do with knives. It will take sometime, but I'm sure it will pay off.

For the past couple of months, I have been binging like some crazy monkey locked up in a cage with tons and tons of bananas. So there, I've been putting on weight and it's obvious. Many people that I have met from my family members, to relatives to friends have claimed that I have put on weight. Some just say "Ben, did you grow bigger?" - just to be nice or some would be straight off blunt and go "Ben, did you put on SOME weight?". Just like good ole' pumba from the Lion King, I'm a sensitive soul BUT I shall do something about it.

I trust that I have put on at least 5kgs during the past couple of months so today, I'm going to gear up, return to my beloved gym - Fitness First and lose those unwanted kgs...

Personally, this gym thing and this weight thing isn't all about being vain, wanting to look good or something like that; of course, that's partially the case but mostly, it's the health benefits that come with it. Imagine this, I used to be able to walk up flights of stairs without breaking a sweat. Today, you'll see me panting all the way up. That does explain something doesn't it?

So there, in front of all you nice people who have been reading my blog, I shall vow to have

1. NO MORE sugary drinks (soda's in particular)
2. NO MORE fattening foods
3. to hit the gym at least 5 times a week
4. to enrol myself into a proper gym program

Bring on the GYM!

The time has arrived. It's the time of the year when I increase the counter which keeps track of the number of mobile phones I have own. The only problem is that I don't exactly recall how many phones I have owned. All I know is that it has peaked over 50 - if my calculations are correct, this should be phone number 55 or 56. Or is it?

Anyway, here is what I got. For those who has been my blog, you would have heard of my excruciating problems with Sony Ericsson's S700i. The problems persisted and I could not hold on any longer. The solution? A BRAND SPANKING NEW... Sony Ericsson K750i!

Okay, some of you may ask, since you had such a bad experience with the S700i, why would you purchase another phone from the same company? The issue, in my opinion does not lie with Sony Ericsson, the brand itself. The brand, as a matter of fact is GREAT. I have always been a Sony Ericsson fan. If I recall correctly I have used at least 10 Sony Ericsson phones. All of which, with exception for the last one was nothing less than GREAT! These phones are packed with features and looks GREAT.

Enough of me blabbering about Sony Ericsson the brand. Let's focus on my black, sleek and beautiful Sony Ericsson K750i as pictured below.



If you've been keeping up-to-date with the mobile phone arena, you would have heard of the array of features the K750i offers.

Here's a quick overview of the features

• 2.0 Megapixel Camera - with Auto-focus - YES! It actually focuses just like a normal camera!
• Brilliant colour screen
• 64MB Memory Stick Duo - supports up to 1GB
• Built-in radio
• Built-in video editor (they call it Video DJ)
• Built-in ringtone composer (not the Nokia type - it actually has drums, trumpets and such!)
• Mann... it'll take me forever to list the features

Anyway, those were just some of the published features. Here's my personal take on the phone.

The box... I shall say is nothing spectacular... just good ole' regular Sony Ericsson style. What's inside was pretty nice...

• 64MB Memory Stick Duo (along with an adaptor to convert the miniaturized memory stick to the size of that of a regular memory stick)
• USB Data Cable - FINALLY!
• and of course, the usuals, the phone itself, manuals, battery and charger.

There is one thing which I really liked about Sony Ericsson mobile phones; and that's connectivity. I've always had no problems sending ringtones, pictures and the like from my notebook to the phone, vice versa and my phone to other phones. Unlike some Samsung or Nokia phones where propreitary software is required for transfer. The key advantage of Sony Ericsson is that they follow industry standards... from bluetooth to the basic infra-red data transfer protocol.

The K750i has followed Sony Ericsson's tradition. This time, they've added an even more innovative idea. Since the phone is capable of using a 1GB memory stick duo, why not change it into a portable storage drive? That's exactly what Sony Ericsson did. Plug in the K750i and it appears just like any other thumb drive.

Another thing I liked about this phone is user-upgradable firmware. If you have owned a Nokia, Samsung or any other mobile phone brands for that matter, you would have experienced faulty firmware, causing the phone to hang, suck up too much battery and the like... requiring you to send the phone back to an authorized service centre for a phone upgrade.

As a matter of fact, the user-upgradable firmware feature was incorporate in most if not all Sony Ericsson phones created or released into the market after the the release of the Sony Ericsson P900 (PDA Phone). All the user is required to do is to have the relevant data cable / docking station (in my case - the USB cable which came with my phone will do), log on to Sony Ericsson's support site, hit "firmware upgrade" and 20 minutes later, your phone is flashed with the latest firmware. So no more waiting in queues and long drives to the service centres.

Go Sony Ericsson go! I'll be posting pictures and videos taken with my brand spanking beloved phone REAL soon...

I am a music person. I love music. Music regenerates me. Music puts me in the mood. Music changes my mood.

A couple of months back, I discovered this site called Live365.com. This site lists thousands among thousands of community run online radio stations. Literally any genre you can think of is there - POP, ROCK, SOUL, LOVE, DISNEY... everything and anything!

The best part of this service is that the service is FREE, supported by ads of course, but if you don't feel kiamsiap (chinese word meaning stingy) and are willing to spend USD4.95 for a monthly subscription, you get ALL the stations in near-CD Quality (I really can't tell the difference between CD and near-CD) that are completely AD free.

Just logon to live365.com and experience it. You don't have to pay a single cent, that is if you don't crave for ad-free and near-CD Quality stations. :) If you do, it's just ~RM19. That's just 2 Starbucks drinks!

Enjoy!

Live life. Live a life with music.

Lately, I found myself getting a little paranoid when it comes to typing e-mails, typing a post for my blog or even having a casual verbal chat with friends.

I learned that I have become extremely dependant on Microsoft Word's infamous grammar correction tool. All I do is blab and rely on Microsoft Word's grammar correction utility to inform me when grammatical errors occur. This paranoia thing doesn't happen to me when I'm using Word to type out my assignments. It only happens when I type an e-mail or document using a standard text-box on the web or through web-based e-mail interfaces.

Instead of just jabbering all the way when typing or verbally chatting with people around me, I have this tendency to repeat the words that I have spoken or typed in my head and actively seek for grammatical errors. At first, it was fine but now, it's gotten to a point where its beginning to be a little annoying and stressful to say the least.

Just imagine yourself chatting with a friend and seconds later, you're repeating that whole to yourself; in search for grammatical errors - it's mind boggling.

There are two things that will be an outcome of this.

1. I become super proficient in grammar
2. I go mad :P

Neither option seems positive enough for me. Instead, I'll create an OPTION THREE... NOT LET THIS HAPPEN. Of course, given a situation where I am required to pick from one of the two, I'll pick the first one :)

So what am I going to do about this? Whenever words repeat in my head, I TELL MYSELF TO RELAX and try not to be too dependant on Word's grammar check feature.

Is this happening to everyone or is it just me?

It's pretty amazing. PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) has been around for quite sometime now but it's only today that it caught my interest.

I have downloaded, installed then uninstalled the PGP software countless number of times. It could be perhaps I didn't exactly understand how the software worked - or I simply had too little friends or shall I say ZERO friends who are using PGP.

I have recently renewed my interest for PGP after going through a semester's worth of a Security unit. Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) was one of the main topics - in there were examples of PGP and how the entire thing worked. Sure I knew the basics of the PKI but when you study this technology in detail - it is when the beauty shows. It's amazing how simple yet complex and secure the infrastructure is with applications in a myriad of areas... ranging from SSL to signing of digital documents and the like.

With the PKI knowledge that I have gained throughout the course, I have decided to join into the world of cryptography by having a copy of PGP installed and creating my very first - OFFICIAL key pair.

Step 1: The download experience
It took sometime before I managed to get a "FREE" copy of PGP. I went to pgp.com and was a little let down to find that the entire - freeware section was gone. That would mean NO FREE PGP for me and the possibility that I might be required pay for the tool. Going through the product catalogue, I found that the cheapest version availabe, the Personal Desktop Edition costs USD 99! Converted to Malaysian ringgit, that's a WHOOPING RM 380! (approximately).

I was on a roll. I needed a copy of PGP installed and I wanted it badly - however, the idea of forking out RM 380 for satisfying a possibly temporary crave does not justify anything. I searched the web, keyed in "FREE PGP" and out comes "The PGP International" webpage with outdated links to a free version of PGP 8.0 at pgp.com. Upon clicking the link, I was brought to the "Trial version of PGP 9.0".

After a thorough reading of the page, I discovered that although they only provided a trial version of PGP 9.0, after the 30 days trial period, the product will revert to a much simpler form with some of the advance features disabled - only retaining some of the more basic functions such as creating encrypted archives, signing and encrypting text, decrypting archives / text and the maintenance of keys.

So there, downloaded the app, got it installed, selected the "stripped down" version during installation (I don't need those additional features) and whoala! It's done.

Step 2: Do you trust me?
Anyone can create a public key pair and claim themselves to be Bill Gates, Bill Clinton or George Bush. All they need is to key in "Bill Gates" during the keypair creation process. So the issue here is, how can these people verify that I am who I claim to be? PGP's solution was it's web of trust, the idea where keys can be "signed" by associates, friends and such. Once the key is signed, the key can be seen to be more "authentic". For instance, if you trust me, know that I am the real Ben and signed my key, your friends who know you would trust me because my key was signed by you.

Ultimately, if you have PGP - please sign my key. You can look me up from https://keyserver.pgp.com/ - just search for benjern@gmail.com.

Step 3: I need friends to use PGP with
No one that I know at the moment uses PGP. So if you have PGP do send me a copy of your public key to my e-mail address. Don't worry, I won't spam you or anything. It's just nice to see my PGP Key Library filled with addresses :)

If you don't have PGP, go grab a copy of PGP 9.0 from here.

Enjoy and bring on the world of ENCRYPTION...

It's sad but it's true. I have been meaning to post this entry. As a matter of fact, I have posted quite a number of entries regarding the ever competitive world of Desktop Search. This time, it's another development and it will certainly change the way you look at MSN's Desktop Search.

The three competing products that I have experienced was OS X Tiger's Desktop Search (Spotlight), Google's Desktop Search and Microsoft's MSN Desktop Search.

One of the most frustrating bits about this desktop search technology was that it doesn't index documents in real-time - that is the moment a file is created or copied into the hard disk, the file will not be included in the search results until much later.

This was an issue that Spotlight took note of and had it resolved. Kudo's to the Apple people.

In the PC world, Google was one of the few to release beta versions of their Desktop Search software and during the beta stage, this problem persisted, documents created couldn't be found in real-time, it took sometime before the utility recognized the newly created or copied files. So imagine this, you have recently typed one of the longest masterpieces in your novel writing career, got the file saved and for some reason forgot where you saved the file. Google Desktop search; during it's beta release wouldn't be able to find that file. You'll have to leave the computer idle for a bit, say 10-15 minutes, before you can get the newly saved file included in the search results.

This problem was not only occuring in Google's Desktop Search (Beta) but also Microsoft's Desktop Search (Beta).

A couple months have passed and being pro-Microsoft when it comes to software apps, I got my system installed with the latest release of Microsoft's Desktop Search. The problem persisted. The only way to get around it was to force the Desktop Search application to "reindex" the drive to ensure all newly created files are indexed. This, I thought was a feasable solution until I discovered that Google have released the latest version of their Desktop Search. I heard from a friend that Google's Desktop Search was intelligent enough and he had no such problems in searching for newly created files.

I got Google Desktop Search downloaded and had it run side by side Microsoft's offering. I created a file on the desktop and immediately searched for the newly created file through Google's engine and true enough - it was INCLUDED in the INDEX! I then tried MSN Desktop Search - and no results were found. This speaks plenty. Google's Desktop Search is more intelligent and constantly scans the drive for new files while Microsoft's offering doesn't.

My questions is WHY??? One thing for sure, Microsoft's offering has a much more intuitive interface but takes longer to load and does not provide realtime monitoring of the drive while Google's offering provides a much simpler (but not necessarily good) interface but has faster loading times and constantly monitors the drive.

So what do I have now? I have got both Google and Microsoft's offering running side by side. This way, I get the best of both worlds, when I do not need to search for files created less than a day ago, I will use Microsoft's offering to take advantage of its highly intuitive user interface while Google will be used to search for files created within the day.

My message to the development teams of both tools...

Microsoft
Great interface but PLEASE work on faster startup times and monitoring of files
Google
The search is great... but PLEASE work on the interface

I have finally gone through all four papers. It feels very good to have all that examination stress lifted off me. It was quite scary, during the examination period; whenever I took naps I would have this voice inside my head telling me "go studyy.... go studdyyy... go studddyy...".

Now that it's all over. I'm relieved. All that is left now is to leave the rest to God and pray for the best.

It's been an extremely long day. Right after the paper, I left for a long needed hair-cut, had dinner with a friend, Azim who just returned from the US, had an extremely long chat with him and headed for a movie.

Batman - The Beginning - it was called. Do you notice that the current trend seems to be moving back in time? With movies such as Star Wars that goes all the way back to Episodes 1, 2 and 3 and now, we've got Batman - the beginning - the story of how the legendary hero came about. I wonder what's next...

The movie was great. 8 out of 10 perhaps? :)

I'm pretty worn out - time to go to bed. More soon...

Finally... and this time, let's hope I hear no more voices telling me to go study.

Good night... or shall I say... Good Morning... :)

Today marks the beginning of the examination period.

Of the four examination papers I am set to sit for, I have finally gone through one...

• MKW 3444 - International Marketing (6th June 2005)
• GCO 3601 - Infrastructure for Electronic Commerce (14th June 2005)
• MKW 2402 - Consumer Behaviour (15th June 2005)
• MGW 2230 - Organisational Behaviour (16th June 2005)

It's one down, three more to go... SMOOOOTH SAILING ALL THE WAY BABY!

Wish me all the BEST!

* sorry, this post was meant to be posted before 12 midnight, it was meant for the 6th of June 2005.

Introducing the four poochateers - up close and PERSONAL!



Seen here is what we believe is the eldest poochateer of the four. His uncanny abilities? Hand and leg movements... and therefore, we shall temporarily call him - "Beethoven"

A video dedicated to his movements will be posted REALLY soon... :)

The poochateer who has more black patches than the rest...

The light brown poochateer - temporarily known as "Garfield" - thanks to my sis :P

The poochateer with a little dot on the head... - temporarily known as "Darth Vader"... :)