Sessions @ BarcampJB

Barcamp is cool. Its way better than what i expected it to be.

Things were casual and the place was full of crazies. But underlying all that craziness was some serious stuff going on. The discussions were intense.

Everyone believes his/her idea is the next big thing, but it doesen't mean anything if you don't execute it properly.
Chak from foldees.com was talking about his start up journey and hit it spot on when he talked about managing expectations, like team members coming to meetings having to complete their assigned tasks and then not doing them...If people get used to being let off the hook for skiving assigned work, that's going to stuff up the company pretty soon. Absolutely crucial.

From idea stage to getting the prototype out. What's next?

Aaron from ezypzy.com shares on how releasing your web app early and more often will be the better product strategy than waiting for ALL the bells and whistles to be complete. Most often than not, conditions change and the best way to improve your product would be feedback from the people who actually use them. :)

On another note, BarcampJB is seriously crazy when its all fun and games. Learnt a new psychotic game and its called MAO. Don't bother checking it out on Google... don't think anyone would tell you or CAN tell you how its played.. hehe..

got to run... got more sessions to catch.. arghh.!!

Prizes up for grabs by all who attend BarcampJB

Today has been 2 months in the making. Barcamp JB is full steam ahead. I just thought the whole concept was fun, and it is. But only after going thru it all made me realise that this whole un-conference "conference" is finally taking shape. Things are looking good.

The venue is nicely done up, the chairs, tables and projectors are in place. The bunting and banners are up, the goody bags and paperwork stuff are being handled, everyones putting in the elbow grease. But hey... what do we have here hiding in this inconspicuous plastic bag? They look like some cool electronic items, would these be the rumoured prizes. Lets see.

BenQ 19" monitor, a couple 4GB & 8GB thumdrives, some really cool maxtor external hard disks, some wireless mice, an ipod shuffle, a blue tooth car receiver, an 3G iphone and a LV bag?

Oh this is cool. Not only do participants get to sit in on quality talks for free, they also get to win great prizes too. This must be the best deal in Singapore, Batam and some even say JB! Don't play play. The lucky draw mechanics are so simple i should have become an animal trainer and recruited a bunch of monkeys to help me win ALL the prizes... muahaha.. but thats not possible.

Anyway heres how anyone coming to BarcampJB can take part in the draw.

Step 1: Upon arrival at the Barcamp JB venue, go to the registration booth, register, pick up goody bag, pick up T-shirt and most importantly. TAKE YOUR LUCKY DRAW FORM.
Its only 1 piece per person, and if you lose it, tough luck then. And good luck counterfeiting the forms, as the latest ink jet fraud prevention measures are used. Either that, or we can throw any scammers off level 29.

Step 2: Visit the sessions you are interested in and vote for your favourite speaker, it would be a hard one as speakers too are in for the best speaker award.

Step 3: Drop the forms at the designated area by 3pm 7th Dec SUNDAY and the lucky draw winners will be drawn at 3:10pm Sunday itself.






Similarly, there is also a contest on-going throughout the event for the best photo submission. Dubbed "The Best SHOT @ BarcampJB" Thats easy to enter too, just make sure you bring along your cameras and snap away. All submitted pics for both saturday and sunday will be shortlisted by the judges.

Top 10 shots will be shortlisted by the judges, and voting will start on 2pm Sunday 7th December. Cool prizes are up for grabs so get that camera ready, the more expensive your camera, the more reason why you should take part in this contest.

However do remember, you have to be present when your name is called out. If you're not there, the prize goes to someone else. So you know the deal. Good Luck & have FUN!!!


P.S: LV bag pictured above not available as prize. bag has been redeemed by owner.
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Top 10 reasons why you should attend BarcampJB

10 - Come get stimulated - intellectually of course

9 - Free Registration, Free food, Free WiFi

8 - Meet new and interesting people from all over the place

7 - Goodie bag and Free T-shirt

6 - Cool barcampJB stickers for sticking on everything

5 - Win great prizes!

4 - Come absorb the amazing energy found only at barcamps!

3 - Crash overnight at cyberport with 50+ other crazy campers! (bring sleeping bags)

2 - Hot chicks Hot chicks HOT chicks*

1 - Just have fun! it beats sitting on your butt at home.

*THIS BLOGGER MAKES NO REPRESENTATION OR WARRANTY OF ANY KIND (EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY) IN RELATION TO THE CLAIMS ON THIS WEBSITE OR ITS CONTENT NOR WHAT ITS SEEM TO PRESENT AND THIS BLOGGER EXCLUDES (TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW) ALL SUCH WARRANTIES.

THE CONTENT CONTAINED ON THIS BLOG IS PROVIDED FOR GENERAL INFORMATION ONLY, ANY ADVICE OR INFORMATION INTERPRETED THROUGH THIS BLOG OR ITS CONTENT SHOULD NOT BE RELIED UPON AS BEING CORRECT OR ACCURATE. IT IS YOUR OBLIGATION TO VERIFY INDEPENDENTLY SUCH MATTERS FROM PRIMARY SOURCES OF INFORMATION, INDEPENDENTLY AND BY TAKING SPECIFIC PROFESSIONAL ADVICE. ANY CLAIMS OF DURESS OR DISAPPOINTMENT ASSOCIATED WITH THE EVENTUAL OUTCOME OF HOW THINGS TURN OUT WILL NOT BE ENTERTAINED. HOTNESS CAN BE A MEASURE OF THE WEATHER AND SO CAN CHICKS BE INTERPRETED AS BABY POULTRY. : )

What its gonna be like at Barcamp JB?

Now thats not a difficult question to answer...  well it all depends on you. The Participant.

For starters, its gonna be held in a office environment. The address is at Level 29, Menara MSC Cyberport. Its somewhere near the new immigration complex. Please don't get lost, use this link.

At Barcamp, the conference is all about the participants, the more everybody participates, the more fun its gonna be.

==!!Thank you sponsors!!==

Venue, food, drinks, t-shirts, prezzies, and all other miscellaneous stuff are all paid for and sponsored by the good people at:

      

                         

                       

                  Lexis Design &Contracts

1FuturesTradingTips.com

==!!Thank you sponsors!!==

So... Here is whats going to happen.

The conferences are gonna be broken down into 3 tracks.  

1. The JB wing
2. The Singapore wing
3. The conference room wing

Each speaker will have about an hour for his/her session, and all three wings will be in session con-currently. 

Yup....   that means most likely you would only be able to sit in 1 session at a time and probably miss out another so you are encouraged to vote with your 2 feet. : ) 

Hey. Life is short, go to the one thats interests you the most. 

and btw, there will be some attractive prizes for participants too and not to mention the best speakers. Simply Vote for the speaker that interests you most and you may find yourself the owner of a brand new ******  ( at time of writing, prezzies aren't known yet) anyway, its gonna be something good. We won't be giving out mouse pads or bookmarks as prizes at Barcamp.

So everything is gonna go down from 9am - 6pm. If you want breakfast, please come early. Its going to be a full day and don't worry food is taken care of. Just get yourself down there.

If you are sleeping over, bring your sleeping bags, Wii, PSP, PS2 etc... its gonna be great!

Theres a final meeting on-site tonite at 7 to pack the goodie bags and do up the venue, so all help is appreciated.. :)

Happy Days!!

Barcamp JB- this wkend 6th & 7th December!

Life has definently changed with the Internet. Just think for a moment, as little as 20 years back, people still had to carry around little 555 notepads with contact numbers scribbled on them. (some still do) Can you imagine how scary it would be to arrange a meeting at wherever it is that people need meet up.

Well, you could say there weren't many places to hang out to begin with in the olden days, but thats another story. hee..

Fast forward to the futre, we have the net, social networking, emails, instant messenging, sms, mobile phones and etc... wow. Life definently has changed.

Thats why you need to get yourself to Barcamp JB this wkend. 6th & 7th December 2008. Its hardly an excuse not to know, because if you are reading this, then now you know. Be in the know on whats cool and what technologies are hip or services that are in demand today. 

This is the first ever barcamp "conference" of its kind to be hosted in JB. The first one in Malaysia was hosted in KL back in July. Theres a long history to it, and barcamps are held all over the world in cities big and small.

In short, its an volunteer powered, ad hoc gathering to get groups of people of different interests to share and learn in an open environment. Anything goes, there will be all sorts of sessions to attend, but the focus will be on entrepreneurship and ICT in general. And of course, Its FREE to attend, FREE breakfast,lunch, tea & dinner and FREE WiFi. Bring your sleeping bag and sleep over if you want to, no kidding.

Its going to be great fun! Although the world might be a large place, but "conferences" like these are set to bring people out and about, and Hey! Geek is the new Cool.

See you at Menara Cyberport!!

Chrome me again!

Previsouly i wrote about how i am leaving my new love and going back to my old love...

sigh...   things are changing so fast that now i'm lost between the two...

torn between a reliable high usability environment and a frequently crashing, but constantly evolving love. Its really tough.

Came across chromeplugins.org a while ago and it really had a couple of neat tricks and hacks for the chrome.

And no, i can't wrench meself off its forum... and check out this plugin. It allows you to view your tabs side by side, excellent for doing research or comparing search results. well you place 2 windows side by side but that wouldn't be cool  rite. heee..

heres the link if you want... its so cool.

so whats a man got to do? Have best of both words? hehe...  think i'm gonna do that.

Shh.. the wife might get the wrong idea..

Saying goodbye to Chrome... *sob**

I was over the moon with google chrome every since it was launched...

But it was pretty much puppy love, and its really a one sided love affair and recently i been thinking of my old love.  I don't think i can live much longer with you.

I miss how you show me the bookmarks on the left sidebar...

I miss how you DON"T have weird little bugs...

I miss how you show the title of the page in the window header...

And of course i miss all the quirky little plugins we have adopted together...

I'm sorry Chrome... i'm going back to firefox. Shes just simply the best.

Love,

xxx

Change...

Yes... its true.

The only true constant is Change. 

Looking lovely Malaysia.. and i love you   :)

Learning from our HISTORY.

It is indeed a tense time for everyone here in malaysia.

Although it is mind boggling why the government is doing what they are doing now, and at such a "teruk" timing.

But i still firmly believe Malaysia is a place where the rule of LAW applies, and above all the rule of logic.

IT is crucial at this time, that all of us, everyone in the country as malaysian should live our lives as usual, go out,buy stuff, watch movies,go play futsal.. etc. Nothing has changed and nothing will change. 

Certain things are happening in certain places, and at bad timing. All of it is a ruse. A ruse to make people upset about the way things are perceived to be. And upset people if further provoked become angry. And angry people do rash things. 

This is uncalled for. Totally.

Why? because the bastards are waiting for the perfect excuse to take action. To declare a non-existent emergency. It is a cuning and desperate ploy,  to claw back whatever power that is left. and it is a evil ploy, have we forgotten our History lessons? Everything hangs in a delicate balance, a thread so delicate that the slightest provocation might cause it to snap. and May 13 here we go again.

But No. we won't go that way. The malaysian people are smarter than that. We learn from our History, so it doesen't repeat itself. 

So the solution is easy, straightforward and stress free.

Be cool. Stay calm. Do not instigate. Do not allow others to make us angry. Its only simple logic that in order to NOT Be upset, we would be just have to find ways to keep ourselves happy.  :)

We have lots to celebrate. Weddings to go to, Raya open houses to visit, babies to carry. our work on earth is not done yet, lots of stuff to do and stuff to precious to flush down the drain, just because we are upset. I don't think so. I rather stay happy, wealthy and wise.

Life is meant to be lived. To quote: " We DO NOT fear the beast but we should not fall for its ruse too... "

Happy Malaysian Day, everyday. :)

Peace !

Here comes Google CHROME !

Anything that is this good and free and from google is worth buzzing about.

Google Chrome has arrived. This is really going to be the turning point for how we use the web.

if you have not heard about chrome, check out its comic here. yeah, its a very creative comic script, and the approach to put up a comic as sales/marketing collateral..... excellent.

this could have only come from google. and so far they have never failed to disappoint or amaze.

Update: Chrome is out! Download it from here.

From first peeks, it really looks great...

PROS:

• search directly from address bar. (allows you to specify default search engine, nice although most would prefer google anyways)
  
• tabbed browsing is up another level. 
  
• love the incognito mode.. (privacy guaranteed especially in the office)
  
• they've made the "current download" section into a page into itself.. nice!
  
• very interesting they way they have made this with gears.. and the browser also allows you to set up a shortcut on your desktop for your favourite web apps. this will be interesting to keep an eye out on. especially on how they actually flip the tables on microsoft. "think blue ocean" :) good stuff.
  
• everything is open source! fantastic.
  
• task manager = similiar to the ctrl+alt+del one but this is for the browser. excellent thinking.
  
• The great open source calling!

Cons:

• too much control in the hands of google.
  
• please! can we have the bookmarks as the left sidebar back? instead of having it floating at the top.???
  
• time to sell microsoft shares?

all in all, an excellent breath of fresh air for the browser wars... :)
whats the problem with IE8? it proprietary and just too much stuff in it than was necessary.  Good luck Microsoft, you've grown into the IBM you beat not so long ago...

now... lets see if enough developers mod up their firefox plugins for the CHROME... that would be an interesting development to watch. especially now we've got gears built in. :)

so what do we call all this? web 3.0? i have no idea.... what i know is i won't be sleeping much next few days... :)

Gold Coins

I remember when I was a kid, my dad came home from his job site lugging a brown cloth bag full of silver colored coins. Big round and grimy looking coins. The whole family then sat down after dinner to cleaning them, once by one. If I’m not wrong, there should be about 60 of them, colonial coins with the Queen printed on them, early 1900-1910s i think. And they made my hands black after polishing with the brass polish.
Well it seems my dad had found someone who wanted to buy up those silver coins very soon after, and it was pity because I always believed them to be of investment value, anything which is that old, is valuable right? Well, too bad we didn’t have the internet back then. So it shouldn’t be the case, now when we have better access to information.

Monaco Rare Coins, (part of the Monex family of companies) for 40 years have been doing what they do best. Helping countless investors manage/invest in precious metals.

If anyone is to want to do anything regarding Rare Coins, Monaco Rare Coins should be their first stop.

They are actively involved in all aspects of the rare coin trade and with a strong market maker acting on your side, you are sure to have good timely information and of course good prices. Not to mention, good liquidity in your assets is also guaranteed as they have an established two-way buy-and-sell market and are able to buy your investments at any time you wish to sell. If gold coins are your thing, you owe it yourself to contact Manaco Rare Coins now.

JB-Singapore MRT ?

Now this really is good news!! The MRT is coming to town!!

Especially for my fellow Johoreans who are working in Singapore or my Singaporean friends who might want to come to visit me. :)

Althought i'm kind of skeptical about it when my dad told me about, well , he was the one who told me that all newspapers are government controlled mouthpieces, but anyway, fingers crossed and lets hope it turns out to be true.

I guess our unique democracy is at work after all, with the coalition government losing out control of 5 states, especially with Selangor and Penang, i guess we would be seeing the government focusing alot of attention and $$$ at Johor.

Johor Bahru(JB) and Singapore share an extraordinary realationship over the years.. and is at the center of much hoo haa by both governments. Lets see... we've got the water issue, the railway issue, ah of course, the crooked half bridge issue and many more.

Singapore's LKY once talked about JB being a cowboy town, and Mahathir once bragged about the governement's aquistion of fighter jets being able to bomb singapore. Sheesh...

Two sister states, born of the same womb but always bickering... sigh. Come on, people when will you ever learn that peace & prosperity goes hand in hand. There is much good both people on both sides if we would even learn to work with one another.

So to initiate on the MRT project and having the focus shift back to the IDR or SJER or whatever's its to be called, is a good thing.

Well, unfortunately it won't be good for everyone. Apparently, the Chief Minister of Johor, Grandfather(datuk, pun intended lah!) Abdul Ghani did mention that a couple of old flats just next to the much overdue but almost completed CIQ complex, will have to make way. And get this, these flats will have to in 2 weeks.WOW! is this the much acclaimed governemnt boost in efficiency or is something else cooking here?? There seems to be no report on how the government would relocate the residents. But i suspet they would be compensated with a pittance, as the flats are govt property anway.

So all in all, the good news is:

1. we would finally get some decent public transport in JB, abeit the system be from another country and to another country. :(
2. Hopefully the jams as the checkpoints would ease up a little and encourage more people to visit JB and bring more business exchanges to the area.
3. It also seems that, the IDR is getting some much deserved life blood pumped into it, before it really dies like a premature foetus.

& of concern would be:

1. a couple of thousand people would be relocated, in 2 weeks.
2. given the poor track record of sticking to agreed terms, lets hope this time its for real and our dear datuk bandar would see it to the projects end. (he did mention that "he expected the project to start in two to three years." )
3. and of course, the ever presence of crony-capitalism.... :(

uh-oh.... but only time will tell and there is always hope. : )

Update: well well well...  the really bulldozed the flats. and how in the world did they get the excavator up on the roof, 15 floors up?? a crane? 

lets hope the JB MRT really comes to fruition. and its also interesting to note that the CIQ is now ready. and work to rebuild the KOMTAR is also underway.  its promising. :)