//beconfused

I felt tremors in Bukit Batok!

I was sitting comfortably on my chair when it started to vibrate a little. It thought the Gundam robots are here. My elephant behaved differently too, it used to be balanced on my round CD compartment, it sort of fell onto the ground. I heard that there is an earthquake in Sumatra or something. The tremors stopped already of course.

Tremors felt around Singapore, some buildings evacuated

Singapore’s Meteorological Services Division says an earthquake measuring 6.6 on the Richter Scale struck Padang, Indonesia at about 11.50am Tuesday.

The epicentre was 50 kilometres north-northeast of Padang, on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia and some 430 kilometres south-west of Singapore.

Tremors were also felt in many parts of Singapore.

Callers to the MediaCorp News Hotline said they felt tremors in areas such as Beach Road, Jalan Besar, Robinson Road and Toa Payoh.

Some buildings, like the Concourse at Beach Road, Capital Square and Centennial Tower in the city, and even Ngee Ann Polytechnic in Clementi, were evacuated.

Witnesses said several tall buildings in the central business district swayed slightly.

Source: ChannelNewsAsia

Okay, they can add that it was felt in Bukit Batok too. I felt it when sitting on the office chair, I happen to be sitting crosslegged watching an anime. Have you felt it too?

Just went back to my polytechnic yesterday. Will post more about it soon. A little busy this couple of days.

_(The new School of Chemical and Life Sciences in Singapore Polytechnic.)_

The above is the new building of School of Chemical and Life Sciences (CLS). Very nice structure although I have seen better. I love the new building. I walked around it and envied the current batch of students.

This is a post I wrote to talk about folders, categories and tagging. I don’t know if you guys have noticed, but my blog isn’t really holding up very well in terms of categorizations and stuff. It is quite apparent that my categories are screwed up.

About folders

It all begins with folders and directories right? It’s the operating system way. It’s so important to store all your documents in a way that you can find it back easily and I don’t mean chunking all of them in your desktop or something.

Folders are probably invented to give people the feeling of their documents kept in a physical location like how they store their newspapers, magazines and tax invoices. When your April edition of Newsweek is in your book self, the same item cannot exist in your bag, the same item cannot be in your mom’s trashbin too.

When you store things like digital photos, haven’t you encounter times when you can’t decide which photo the image should go into?

I can have 3 folders:

* Buildings
* Singapore
* School

And I have 1 picture of my secondary school which is in Singapore. So should I put it in Buildings? Or Singapore? or School? Can’t it be all three?

About categories

So we have categories. That really saved the day. My problem is solved. Now I can assign categories to my picture. I assign it to 3 of the categories. And when I select a category to filter out – for example – Singapore, I can see my beautiful picture as one of the many images that is presented to me.

That is how WordPress does things by the way. It is more intelligent this way. For example, this post can go into Technology and Site related. It’ll make the post much easier to find for you guys.

About tagging (or labels or keywords)

But still, I have a problem. My picture could have been assigned with more categories. My picture is taken in Bukit Batok, in Singapore, and is of a School and that’s a Buildings. It’s taken at Night. My Friends and Teachers are in the picture. We are having Barbecue.

Now, that is a hell lot of categories already. The category structure has a major restriction – it has to be created before something is assigned into it. An analogy would be that you decide to buy 3 copies of Newsweek this time, one is left in your mom’s trashbin, one in your bookshelf and one in your bag. You can easily go to either of these places to fetch your Newsweek. You need to have a bag first before you put your magazine inside. You need your mom’s trashbin to be present first too.

Tagging is just a smarter way of categorizing. Basically, you assign all sorts of keywords you want to your document. My picture with us barbecuing can be assigned – Food, Barbecue, Teachers, Friends, Buildings, Singapore, Night, Bukit Batok and Gathering.

Another picture can be an image of my polytechnic in Dover, taken with my pals in a computer laboratory. That can be tagged with – Dover, Singapore, Polytechnic, Friends, Teachers, Computers, Lesson, Campus and Perl.

In a way, no categories exist. Instead, a lot list of tags are gathered distinctively and displayed in front of you. When you select the tag ‘Friends’, the page is generated and all the pictures containing the tag ‘Friends’ is fetched out and displayed.

Back to the analogy with my Newsweek magazine, it can be tagged with Bag, Mom’s Trashbin and Bookshelf. When I choose to go to the Bag, my Bag is generated so that I can get my Newsweek along with all the items tagged with the keyword Bag.

The advantage is you can assign as many tags as you want without worrying that the categories are no present prior to assigning. It’s easier to manage too.

And WordPress 2.0.2 (latest version) doesn’t support tagging natively. Major Web 2.0 implementation such as Flickr does tagging. It’s fun, non-restrictive and quick. I just hope that more softwares would be implemented in this way. Hopefully WordPress would support it in their next release. It’d be really cool.

Windows Vista, the successor of Windows XP, will allow users to assign keywords to files. It’s a similar to tagging but we really have to see how Microsoft implement it in the end. Keywords are implemented more for search than categorization purposes.

Sorry if the whole post is a total bore to you. I kinda enjoy writing these stuff, hahaa…

Not long ago, I was talking to Jeremy about the times in polytechnic

And he went on to tell me about an incident so familiar. He told me that he did some mischievous stuff during his polytechnic life and they all found it funny. It was just a joke although it’s an inconsiderate one.

(Our trash bins are green!)

He and his group of friends pushed 3 green rubbish bins into a lift. They manage to carry the rubbish bin from all corners of the lecture block and all stuff it into a lift. Then they laugh all day long because no one can enter the lift! They watch the people appear in frustration and amusement.

And I told him that that incident happened to me too. My then-classmates pushed a trash bin and a ‘Danger Keep Out’ sign into the lift. And guess what, my neighbor did the similar by pushing one trash bin into the lift.

So there seems to be a total of 3 incidents that involved trash bins found in lifts. And I actually thought it was quite an original prank.

Jeremy and gang actually placed three of the trash bins! We all had a good laugh though. There must’ve been something about all these trash bins, the polytechnic students seem to prefer them in lifts. And guess what – the 3 incidents all occured in Singapore Polytechnic.

I’m sure the cleaners would be less than amused.

Once in a while, I’ll just dig out statistics and view keyphrases. Keyphrases are what people are searching this the search engines to get to my blog. So I wondered how my blog can be connected to the world.

But this time, I found that some men are searching for the strangest things! In no particular order:

* singapore girls wearing bikini
* ericia lee maxim
* fiona xie in own bikini
* zoe tay wearing bikini
* ann kok in bikini
* archive of fhm singapore

See, it’s all about the bikini’s. And I don’t have search things, the nearest is probably Ann Kok stripping to her bra. It’s quite funny to see what local people are searching. Most people include Fiona Xie into their searches because she’s the hotter one and she once ran in bikini in Orchard Road for a drama series about bikini swimming.

Then there are people who seem to be searching for some sex-related videos of Singaporean women:

* singapore college student caught in act
* singapore phone video clip student
* sex singapore bukit batok
* polytechnic student caught in video
* singapore student video

This is probably with regards to the now famous Tammy incident. Tammy is a 17 year old polytechnic girl who lost her phone with video clips of herself having oral, normal and anal sex with her boyfriend. I didn’t even want to talk about it when the outrageous video clip got the attention of our media on Febuary, I’m tired of the news so you didn’t see any news in my blog on this. And trust me, I don’t have the Tammy video, perhaps you guys can try other web sites instead.

And finally, some men just prefer artwork:

* ragnarok cute female pictures

I do have Ragnarok pictures that I thought was quite cute – ones that my friend gave me when he married a character in the game.

_(My friend Daniel’s online wedding images in the game. I thought that’s a pretty cute feature. Image used with Daniel’s permission.)_

[Apologies to the crazy pingbacks in my blog, some scripts of mine went wrong.]

After I finish my Basic Military Training (BMT), I found myself with a lot of time. Then I start to think since I am so damn free.

And it was then I realize – damn it, I ain’t so free after all.

_(I have not pay my SingTel bills!)_

First, I didn’t pay my phone bills. I just forget about it totally and my phone company – SingTel – sent me a reminder in red! They threatened to cut my line! How dare they! Anyway, I went to pay up already. I am not so free to pay all the time and I am thinking of allowing SingTel to take the money from my bank account to pay automatically.

Then it is my Singapore Polytechnic diploma certificate and transcripts. As I was held up in the army, I wasn’t able to book out and join my school’s graduation hence I did not get my certificate. I am quite pissed that time. I would like to collect them from my school soon.

Also, I wish to check out my magazine subscriptions, I don’t see all my magazines coming and I am not pleased! Damn it, I paid okay. It’s been 2 months.

And my insurance, it is over-deducting from my bank!! I didn’t allow a transaction of that much, I’m losing money…

I still got to return some library books. I got to pay my lecturer some money too. I need to pass some money to a couple of friends from polytechnic. I still need to collect the money that people owe to me.

All of a sudden, it just seem that I have a lot of unfinished stuff that I should have done earlier. I just didn’t do it when I am in the camp. I’m going to finish all these one by one on Monday. Today, I’ll just do the most important thing in my task list – tidy my room and unpack my stuff from army.

Ah, I’m back again – for the Microsoft Excel competition. I did the competition already, I won’t win the competition.

I scored 938 out of 1000. As far as I know, the people who win this competition scored full marks in the previous years. I know my mistake and revealed my mistake to my lecturer who will tell another guy who is going to take the test. I believe that he made this similar mistake too.

I hesitated in revealing my mistake at first. I was thinking if I should let others learn from my mistake and be better than me. But after thinking for a while, I decided to reveal this mistake I made in the XML question.

The reason is that I can’t win, perhaps someone from Singapore Polytechnic (same as me) would win the competition. All the best to him. I felt better after I speak out about that mistake too. I treat it as a way of returning what the nice lecturer have patiently imparted his Excel skills.

I returned home with nothing, but I felt glad that at least I got the Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Expert certificate. It isn’t that bad I guess.