Qoomonster moved here

sneakers!

At this point I’ve more than a little obsession with shoes. Damn Piperlime and Endless!

I’ve graduated from sneakers to casuals – that’s a step! And shopping online makes shoe shopping so much easier. No more hunting for my size, around the sale aisle, trying to find the matching half to my shoe. I can sort by size, width, colour, height, style – and it comes with free overnight shipping most times.

Now, if they could only sell closets the same way.

view of my backyard

Finally after almost years of uhm-ing and awh-ing, I made the move. And while I love Vox as a standalone blog service, the main reason why this blog is now Powered by WordPress is the ease at which I was able to import my 762 old entries. It took a couple of tries, but honestly, it was really simple and fast. It took less time to import my old MT entries than it did for me to find my way around Vox’s phantom import tool.

Making my blog domain point here was a little more complicated, but Netjackal (my favourite service provider in the WWW) was on hand to answer the barrage of questions that came flying fast his way. In the end, it took me a couple of hours in total, which is really quick, given I’d probably take twice the amt of time to futz around with the CSS on MT alone. That’s not counting the time it takes to debug my bad code thereafter.

And holy cow, there’s an automatic draft-saving mode on this baby. Neato.

Anyway, I’ll quit fawning over my new and neato discovery of the day for now, and will attempt to re-pot some of my plants today while the sun is out and the weather is going to be fine. As for you guys, go ahead and check out the old posts – the links now work (again) and so does search.

Yay! It is a Happy Niu Year!

I’d really rather be in Japan

Nah, just moving my knitting-related photos and frustrations over to another blog and another Flickr account.

Was impressed with Vox years ago when Netjackal told me about it, and am still impressed with them now. It’s almost as if they know what a blog user wants (and needs).

How? Maybe they spend more time implementing what someone needs than by pandering to politics and beauracracy. Maybe. Or maybe they’re just lucky. I wish Y! bought them instead of wasting that much time on crap like 360° and Mash – which they’re now shutting down. Poor Mash. It didn’t even make it past beta. It’s middle name would’ve been “Ill-Conceived”. Mash Ill-Conceived Yahoo! (or the other way around, like Oriental names). Like a sad child whose parents struggled with the status of their relationship, and had another baby partly to “make their relationship stronger”, and partly to replace or sustain their other child 360°. His short, sad life ended before it really began.

Yahoo! Communities should just adopt. Vox is a bright, good kid, who’s growing up real fast. They might have to marry it instead.

Why do I like Vox?
1. Plenty of themes to choose from. Like P-L-E-N-T-Y. The theme I chose for my knitting blog is part personlised. All I did was add that image up top. Easy, yet personal.
The trouble with a load of blog products, free or otherwise, like Blogger and the (now defunct) Y! 360°, Livejournal, Moveable Type, Typepad, etc was that they took too much time and effort to look presentable. Either there was no/little choice – like Blogger/Y! 360°, or it took too much trouble messing with the damn CSSes – like with MT. MT was a real pain, because I’d have to find templates for my version of MT and all, and I’d have to log into the MT admin, test it and stuff. That explains why I’m not changing the look of this blog. It also explains why the commenting is screwy, and I lost the ones from the previous domain. Ah well.

2. Easy to use. Relatively. A quick set up, it still is easy to find my way around set-up and publishing, stuff like that.

3. They make it easy to find content to publish. A lot of the time, the main problem with blogs is that the person writes a few entries, then decides there’s nothing to talk about and stops. Vox tries to help them along by making it easy to add a host of content like photos, audio clips, videos, books and all. They also get content from third parties, so you’re not limited by what you have on hand. You can also get plugged into your own Flickr/Photobucket account easily. So there’s always something to talk about.

4. They find friends for you. Another obstacle for bloggers is that not all of them are all that famous and because they’re mostly writing personal stuff, they don’t get a lot of readership. I mean, who’d write if no one’s reading? Vox scours your addressbook to look up your friends (by their email address, silly) so you can add them in your “neighbourhood”. It’ll also send a notice to the folks who aren’t on Vox to tell them where your blog is. So it’s kinda like Facebook in that way. Gives you an overview of your friends’ updates, and tells the lame ones who aren’t on to check you out, mesmerise those lame-ohs and try to make them cool.
This satisfies the Love/Belonging needs in Maslow’s Hierachy. Very clever, these social new-fangled internet 2.0 babies.

5. They help you belong. So if you are going to write about something specific, for example knitting, where you can’t pay your friends and family to read that stuff, you can find groups to share those interests. What’s on those groups? Basically, collective posts. It’s a digest. People write on their blogs, and choose to post to those groups, quite like Flickr photo groups, it’s like a large collective blog.
This satisfies the Love/Belonging, Esteem and perhaps even Self Actualisation needs in Maslow’s Hierachy (if your self actualisation needs are that complex).

The one BIG thing they don’t solve, is your baggage. Most blog publishers are, by now, not virgins anymore. This wouldn’t be their first blog, and unless they’re willing to make a clean break, there does not seem to be an easy way to import older posts onto Vox. Yeah, there are probably issues associated in doing so, it will require a lot more diskspace, they’d have to write import tools for a host of different blogs, etc. But I’d be the first to ditch my MT blog for this – if I will be able to import the old entries. It’d be perfectly ok even if I lost the comments. That saves me and my favourite service provider some maintenance time.

I don’t know if I’d pay for it. Maybe. After all, I now pay for a Flickr Pro account! Yeah, I’d pay for it if the price is right ~ $50 a year. That should cover the import of my old entries, sort of hosting for the year, and if I pay for it I definitely want my own domain. Yeah.

Why do I feel like I just wrote the bulk of someone’s PRD.

Counting down till I get home.
Thinking about the food I want.
Missing the people I care about.
Looking forward to warmer weather.

Bak Chor Mee.
Chye Tow Kueh – black version.
Jwee Kueh.
Salted Vegetable Duck Soup.
Curry + Prata.
Bak Kut Teh.
More Bak Chor Mee.

=P~

is, unfortunately, in Cantonese.

I’m not going to spoil it by translating it for you. But giving credit where it’s due, I ran across it here.

Loves it loves it loves it.

There’s still one great place to be on the internet.

Just when you thought things could not get more geeky, someone goes ahead creates this piece of complete brilliance.

Even though KF and I walked about 3 hours to find the Nintendo headquarters in Kyoto, we didn’t realise that the fabled video game heaven started off producing playing cards.

I bet KF had the Zelda theme playing in his head through all the walking.

I was called a jaded cow today because I did a lame “haha” instead of a “hahaha”.

I guess I am. Just like engineers find no fun in simply implementing a piece of software created by someone else, I find little joy in re-producing a product.

So I’m particularly pleased with our second newest kid on the block. It’s a little mish-mash, a little lifestyle, a little ugc, and a lot cheeky. And the best part is that it is a born and bred Singaporean. Not some weird import from Sunnyvale or Bangalore or London. Perhaps we’ll have a little more fun at the otherwise completewasteoftime annual awards ceremony next year.

The newest kid on the block is the completely spiffy feature my desk buddy, lil’P1, unveiled on her movies site. Not only can you review movies now, do a really good job and they’ll feature you! Totally cool, totally fun.

I hogged the morning launch spot, so she had launch in the afternoon. Great for us, but it must have been a completely crazy day for the RnR, Service and QA Engineers, and our resident webimp, Looey-gee. It’s been a particularly long time since I launched something locally, and it’s such a nice feeling to actually be able to interact face-to-face with the people who run the final and most important leg of the process. It was such a rush that I felt the residual nervous buzz wayyy into the evening. So did Ms Mads who had to bear the brunt of my bad behaviour.

I really enjoyed the process today. It was fun to get into the thick of things again, and perhaps it alleviated some of the humdrum, but I’m pleased for a change. Not quite content, the greedy bit in me wants more for our little ‘un, but I’ll be happy to take it a step at a time. For now.

To infinity and beyond!

This is so funny.

I expected to buy up a storm when I took a couple of days off after Christmas for the Post Christmas Sales. But alas, nothing materialised. It was wet, and crowded, and disgusting. I hardly bought anything (that I remember at least).

offline
Then a couple days back I went health food shopping. Got my mom an all-natural facial essence and she seems to be pleased with it. She says it makes her feel refreshed. I had to check that she wasn’t eating it, haha. She also likes the ginseng pills, she says she feels less tired after consuming it. That was moola well spent, if I do say so myself. Too bad can’t do my health food shopping online.

online
Last night out of sheer itchybacksideness I went to Amazon and found myself unable to resist her charms. I love Amazon. It’s been there since text-based browsing, and it was already a personal favourite then – remember they were the world’s largest book store? With 2.5 million titles? As the internet matured Amazon moved along with it – selling more than books – and now I am so dependant on the community on Amazon to help me make a purchase (even at a brick and mortar store) it’s scary.

In fact – because of the description and the reviews on Amazon, I bought Cranium instead of Trivial Pursuit, and I didn’t bother with Scene It.

Using Amazon is easy and fun. It looks like a company that’s focused on doing 1 thing, with many moving parts co-perating to make that 1 thing happen. I always enjoy myself there. Because:

1. They take pains to give you an endless browsing experience. There are always sale items and bargains
2. When you’re done browsing, they tell you what other people thought of the product, and what else they purchased
3. They keep your browsing history, in case you want to go back
4. If you search something, they will help you refine your search. For example, I searched Women’s shoes. And on the left nav, you can find different other filters – like filter by brand, by size, by price. You can add a filter within a filter, so I can look for shoes that are a) from Asics b) size 5 and c) under $50
5. After you make your purchase, you get a day or so to make changes to the order. So there have been instances where right before the order ships, I change my order to something completely different, and nothing bad happens. You don’t have to call customer care and apologise profusely, you don’t have to write an email to explain things. It happens on your My Account dashboard.
6. The community of reviewers and raters – people who own the product and will tell you if that pair of jeans runs small or the game is better than another. It’s invaluable
7. $25 free shipping. Neato!
8. If you want to sell something, they’ll fill in the product details for you, cos they have it!

After Amazon, I still didn’t feel like I had quite enough, so I headed onto Target.com. Target has its own set of inventory, but the backend is an Amazon one, so you can use the same login, and it also features the 1-Click purchasing. Neato!

Two huge online shopping sites, 1 board game, and 3 pieces of clothing later, I pressed on and headed to Gap, Old Navy and Piperlime – their shoe store. You used to be able to buy Gap off Amazon, but they might have ended that relationship. Well, why would you use Amazon to sell your stuff if your site isn’t so bad itself.

The feel of Gap, Old Navy and Piperlime is different from Amazon. First, there is no user reviews and ratings. The site is more browse than search. But – they’ve also gone to some lengths to make the buying experience easier for their target audience. For example, now you can do a Quick View from the browse page instead of clicking a top and waiting for a page to load to see if you like it or they have it in your size and then go back and continue browsing. The Quick View loads on the browse or category results page without disrupting your original flow.

Old Navy boasts $5 shipping, and most times at Gap if you purchase over $75 you get free standard shipping anyway. At Piperlime, shipping is free for most shoes.

The only grouse I had with Piperlime is that they didn’t seem to share the customer database with Gap/OldNavy so I had to register again. But it wasn’t too difficult to set up. I just didn’t like typing the address in all over again.

After you shop at a US store, you can’t really bear to use any of the online stores here (except out of desperation). Maybe to order a hamper. But that’s about it.

Anyway. Here I am, the next day, with a large shipment on VPost, an email from Target saying they’ve shipped, and a hole in my pocket that hopefully will come in handy for Chinese New Year.

And this is why it’s so fun to be on the internet.