Harrassing the Butterfly
30/11/2003
Long day
Spent almost the whole day at Roger’s wedding ceremony and dinner today. Originally planned for breakfast even, and a stroll at the Botanics in the morning but woke up at noon instead. On hindsight, it was really a fat hope, since we don’t even wake up before 9am on workdays.
The church ceremony was kinda sweet and upbeat. Andrea looked great. And there was lotsa singing and clapping (with a band and stuff), and stuff translated into mandarin. Nice change from the solemn Catholic ceremonies.
In the short break after the church ceremony and before dinner, we headed to the Expo to visit Sitex, the computer show. It was so crowded, I got tired just walking through the crowd. Didn’t buy anything.
After dinner, which was at Liang Court, we managed a couple rounds of Time Crisis at Clarke Quay. It feels great. I remember asking Ben Choi before he left for good, how he coped with his working environment. He said, “2 words. World Combat”. Or was it Time Crisis? One of those.
Snuffing the competition
At Sitex today MSN had their butterflies flitting all over extolling the benefits of MSN. As a websnob I abhore them. But nonetheless in the name of checking out the competition, I sucked it up and went up to the booth and tried to look impressed with MSN Messenger. My opinion is that they’re so unsure about their product they needed to have the application bundled with the OS. Hahhaha. Ok, I will give credit where it’s due (albeit grudgingly) and the fact is, they did make MSN Messenger pretty functional. Y! Messenger needs to play serious catch up.
I asked the Butterfly at the counter if their Messenger would work with any webcam, and with a dumb look asked where I could download their Messenger. All so that they’d give me one of those lameass notebooks (paper, not laptop). Ah well. For what its worth, I think I did sound pretty genuine, I thought I sounded just like those people who call us each day to complain that something isn’t working.
I’ve also found strangely that after starting my blog, I’ve been checking out my friends’ blogs more seriously. Previously I just read them and got bored with them. Some were totally personal and I felt a little intrusive. Imagine that! Being intrusive on the internet! But mostly, I never went back. Now I’m checking them out – maybe I need to feel some form of affinity. I don’t know.
My favourite browser
I can’t believe I haven’t mentioned this, but I’m in love with a new browser. It’s been around for a while, but MyIE 2 is made for the internet code cruncher. It behaves like IE, but is so much smarter. The plugins are the best thing ever. Here are my favourites:
1. The one that checks out the word you highlight on Dictionary.com (there’s an m-w.com and an encyclopaedia.com version as well).
2. The colour hex code one which will tell you the hex code of any part of an HTML document.
3. The partial view source one where you highlight the bits of a page and it gives you the html source for just that portion.
There are lots more, like a flash file saver, email this tab button – it goes on.
