Monthly Archives: December 2008

Merry Christmas, everyone

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Played at the hotel last night and it was pretty packed. This Christmas morning I got all prepped up with my Korg keyboard and the choir breezed through four items: Glad Tidings, The Trumpet Shall Sound (from Handel’s Messiah, sung by my uncle Keng Lock), Silent Night, and the Hallelujah Chorus from Messiah. For my preludes I had some carols played with a church bells sound, as well as O Holy Night. The offertory saw me playing Bach-Gounod’s Ave Maria (a really beautiful piece), and I ended with Joy to the World (Handel) as a postlude. Several church members complimented me about my playing, so that was nice. All’s well, that ends well.

And it’s also during this period that I’m fortunate enough to enjoy lots of good food—however, I don’t gorge myself much. Everything in moderation, and I’m still keeping up with my two dozen laps in the pool, at least on most weekdays.

Merry Christmas to all my readers—thank you very much for reading my blog, and for the comments. May 2009 bring us much peace, love and joy. God bless all of you.

The Christmas Tree at the hotel lobby

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‘tis the season—to be insane?

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Yeah, you read that right

I awoke two days ago, went down to the lobby area of my apartment, and found this painted boldly in front of the porch area. Sheesh, I don’t know whether to be amused or angry. The dude who had this painted obviously doesn’t know English very well, or didn’t bother to check an English dictionary first. Merriam Webster defines droppings as dung, i.e. the poop produced by animals. Just a simple DROP ZONE would have sufficed, don’t you think? Even then, Merriam Webster defines Drop Zone as:

the area in which troops, supplies, or equipment are to be air-dropped ; also : the target on which a skydiver lands.

See, I did my research first. Oh what the heck, just scrub those words off!

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The Home Stretch

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This is it—the run-up to Christmas. Last choir practice tonight (phew) and then the grand presentation on Christmas morning itself. I’m also preparing items to play on my Korg PA-50 keyboard for the Prelude, Offertory and the Postlude. I’ll be playing at the hotel for four nights from Christmas Eve until December 27. Then a little respite until New Year’s Eve, where just about everybody seems to go insane at the stroke of midnight. Me? I’m usually in bed, watching a DVD. All this celebrating stuff isn’t my cup of tea (or coffee).

As I look back at 2008, it hasn’t been one of my better years, but I am reminded of what the famed Albert Einstein said:

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

Have a happy and safe Christmas, everybody. See you on the other side.

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No such thing as a free lunch?

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Times must be bad indeed. I wrote in a recent post about my free giveaway: two copies of my ebook, Learn to Play the Piano in 12 Lessons. All you have to do is click on the Contact Me Link just below my blog header, fill in your name and email (I respect your privacy, email addresses will not be sold or handed out), and just tell me why you’d like to get a free copy of my ebook. That’s all there is to it. I’m still waiting for entries to come in *fingers drumming away on the table*.

Perhaps the word free has been abused too much. I’ve come across software on the web begging readers to download “for free,” only to notice in the small print that it times out after X number of days. Then there are magazine subscriptions where yes, you can get X months or X copies free. You’d have to start paying after that, though. And a lot of local supermarkets here still advertise about buying certain products and receiving a “free gift.” Guys, a gift is already free.

However, I don’t mind doing a little work if the rewards look tempting enough. I participated in a contest organized recently by a petrol (gas) station chain here where they dangled prizes like LCD TVs, etc. for participants. All we had to do was fill in an entry form with our details, and pump some petrol (gas) for our cars. I have to feed my car anyway. Hopefully I’ll win a prize.

So, get cracking if you want to stand a chance of winning a free copy of my ebook. As I’ve said in the first paragraph of this post, you don’t have to do much. But you do have to enter.

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The Windows Live Messenger 9 Saga (Continued)

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If you’ve read my previous post, you’d know that I’ve updated to the latest version of WLM 9 (14.0.8050.1202). Then I began to notice that certain things weren’t working as they should be. For instance, tabbed chats stopped functioning. If I was chatting to more than one contact, the chat windows kept piling up on top of one another, making it impossible for me to view the covered windows. Tried dragging the top window aside to view the obscured windows, but no luck. All the other windows followed!

Another “bug” was that there was no flashing of a continuing chat in the taskbar area. Yes, I could still hear a sound when a contact sent me a chat message, but I missed that flashing notification (we’re creatures of habit, aren’t we? Or maybe I am).

I was just about to curse, when I remembered that I’ve been using Messenger Plus! Live, a third-party plug-in for WLM. Now, Plus! is a very good plug-in (thank you, Patchou), it’s free, and it works. Don’t install the sponsor program though, which is adware. However, I figured that Plus! was not 100% compatible with this latest version of WLM, so I disabled some of its settings (it has a tabbed chat section) and surprise, surprise, my chat windows no longer piled up on top of one another! And the flashing notification worked again! I’m sure Patchou (the author of Plus!) will come up with a fix for this latest version of WLM soon.

So if you’re experiencing trouble with this latest version of WLM, my advice would be to disable any third-party plug-ins you might have currently installed in your system. Then see what happens. Have fun!

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New Windows Live Messenger 9 is released

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The latest version of Windows Live Messenger is Build 14.0.8050.1202, and it’s available now. This isn’t the final version yet, but looks more like a Release Candidate to me (it has lost the Beta tag). Download it here.

What’s more, a lot of other programs in Windows Live have been updated. These include Messenger, Mail, Writer (I’m using it to write this), Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Toolbar, and Family Safety. Additional programs are Microsoft Office Outlook Connector, Office Live Add-In and Microsoft Silverlight. The installer will check to see what you have in your system and will update any previous versions.

I’ve noticed that the infamous WLM emoticon bug has been squashed, at least for me. All my custom emotes show up as I’m typing in the conversation window. However, my friend Doris had a glitch while upgrading, her custom emotes and winks were nowhere to be found after the upgrade. So it’s advisable to make a backup of your custom emotes first before you upgrade.

Windows Live icons

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Gone to WordPress 2.7

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This morning I decided to impress myself and do the upgrade to WordPress 2.7. Since I’d upgraded to 2.6.5 barely a week or two ago, the upgrading steps were still fresh in my mind. Nevertheless, I decided to do a backup of my WP SQL database in case something went wrong. Did the backup, downloaded WP 2.7, and then started my FTP program. Followed the WordPress detailed upgrade instructions carefully, deactivated all my WP plug-ins, deleted the relevant old files and folders. Copied over the new files via FTP to my site, checked everything, and logged in to my WP dashboard. Voila! WordPress 2.7 is installed and running successfully.

I was fortunate in the sense that one (and only one) existing plug-in didn’t work completely with 2.7. It’s Viper007Bond’s excellent Admin Bar plug-in. I just visited his website and was told that

This plug-in works with WordPress 2.7, but has some minor bugs. It won’t break your blog or anything like that though. Expect an update soon.

See how considerate and thoughtful authors can be? Thank you, Viper.

The new WP 2.7 dashboard does require some getting used to, as now all the menus are in a column on the left (some have expandable drop-down buttons). But I like it though. And the automatic upgrade thingy I mentioned in my previous post is available in Tools > Upgrade. If I click that now, it just informs me that I already have the latest version of WordPress. Very nice.

All in all, I’d give a big two thumbs up to all those hardworking people in WordPress who slaved over this new version. And it wasn’t too long ago that I upgraded to 2.6 (the previous major upgrade). That’s the computer world for you.

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