Monday Morning War between Sleep, Work and Coffee

It’s always hard for me to go back to work on Monday. The bed feels extraordinary comfortable than usual. Eyes can’t hardly open and sensitive to sun light. There seems to have some kind of magnet in my body that keeps on pulling me to the bed. It very difficult to pull myself to the bathroom… These are all the excuse that comes in my mind saying “Stay, skip work today” every Monday morning. I have to fight on to go to work. It’s a terrible fight as the war zone is in my house. The Enemy has advantages on the land marks. The bed, the sofa, even the soft carpet on the floor can drag me down. The only way to survive is to get out of the house fast and rush to work. 10 minutes of washing and dress up is the basic necessary for work. After the preparation, breakfast has to be schedule in the office. Ever minute spends in the house increase the risk of going back to sleep again.

Next is run and pursued. This part of war occurs on the way to work. Strictly speaking, it’s the fight to keep awake when driving to work. It’s the most difficult and terrible fight. If you own a fairly expensive car that has a very comfortable seat, cool air conditioning system, absolute sound prove and super sound system that plays Johann Pachelbel Canon in D major, you’re going to have a hard time winning the war. If you lose this part of war, you might end up sleeping in the hospital for month. Worst scenario might just be not waking up at all. In order to win this war, you must switch to wake up songs like Girlfriend by Avril Lavigne. It might not be your type of songs but you need it. Roll down your windows and enjoy the cold morning wind. That is unless the air is clean enough and not carbon monoxide from the heavy traffic. Get some toothpicks in your hand and ready to poke yourself when feeling sleepy. This part of war usually last not more than 20 minutes, unless the work place is far away or unfortunate traffic jam occurs.

So when or where coffee comes in? Well, the first thing that we put into our mouth after wake up definitely is coffee. It is really not a good idea of having just coffee without any solid food but that’s one way to wake up. I’m sure many of us did that. Not encouraging as it’s not good for health. Thus some will wait to have their wake up coffee. Second location that we can take coffee is along the road to work. We just have to make sure that the coffee doesn’t get in the way while driving. Spilling the coffee while driving might cause accident. Thus some will consider wait extra longer to have their wake up coffee. The third and final place to have coffee is in the office. After all those excitement, it’s not “wake up” coffee any more, it’s “start working” coffee to be more precise.

P/S: I just hope that we can sleepwalking to work. Don’t have to go through so many troubles. Just wake up sitting in the office and ready to start working.

Entertaining Evening Dinner with My Friend singing on stage

It’s very enjoyable when you are able to enjoy a good meal with friends while listening to the songs presented by your friends. The food might be a bit expensive than usual but given that it’s delicious and the dinning environment is great. I say it’s worth the price. Not to mention that we are able to enjoy the singing performance for about couple of hours too. That evening definitely is entertaining.

At the beginning, a friend of mine that likes to sing started out singing in restaurant just for fun. It was once in a while performance and it’s not about money but the satisfaction of able to sing in public. He also participates in song writing contest and received great results. Lately he gathered couple of his friends and form a band just for the fun to perform at various occasion. The band is called Mangroove and you may check out the website for details.

That night I was around the area where my friend has a live performance in a small restaurant. So I call out couple more friends to join me for dinner and check out their singing performance. I pick a table that is close to the stage and wait until my friends show up. As usual while waiting, I look around and observed the people around me. The table beside me sat 4 youngsters that seem wealthy. They look like college students, having lots of drinks that seem expensive without a sense of worrying about money. They laugh and talk as if they own the restaurant and nobody complain about it. Oh well, it doesn’t bother me at all. In fact it’s kind of interesting for me to watch them. At the other side at the corner of the restaurant, is table of 4 is celebrating birthday party. I’m pretty sure that it’s a birthday party for a girl. Boys normally won’t or don’t celebrate birthday party in a restaurant where all the unknown waiters and captain singing “Happy Birthday” to god knows who they sing to. Still this trick successfully make the birthday girl put on a smiling face for the entire evening.

It rain that night but my friends still shows up. We talk and place our order. Couple more minutes later, my friend that suppose to sing arrived. We had a short conversation as he needs to prepare for his performance. When the food arrived, he began his little concert. To my surprise, the sound system in the restaurant is well equipped. It’s nothing like other restaurants that I’ve been before where only bass and shouts can be heard. In this restaurant, I’m able to listen clearly every single songs performed. That’s good for the audience but not completely good for the singer. Any songs that are badly performed will be noticeable clearly. That’s the thing my friend worried as some songs perform is requested by customers. He has to be ready and good enough to perform the requested song, or switch song if not familiar with the song. If not people might boo him from down below. Overall the singing performance is good. There are some songs that are not quite well performed but still acceptable.

It was about 2 hours singing performance. It’s very entertaining as some of the song brings back a lot of memories. We are able to enjoy English songs, Chinese songs, hokkian songs and kantonese songs thanks to our friend that speaks and sings so many languages. Even though

Expensive Coffee from Cat Poo

I post about this special kind of coffee about 2 years ago and it seems that this coffee is still hot. Cat poo coffee still tastes as good as before and the price still at the top of it, seems like it. An article that I stumble at thedaily.com.au features Cat poo coffee reminds me again that I must not miss out this special coffee. As a coffee addict, one of the enjoyable moments is to able to taste different kind of coffee from all over the world. That includes the expensive cat poo coffee. No doubt it might feel strange or perhaps may give it a second thoughts weather to drink coffee made of cat poo, but if the coffee smells good and looks good then why not give it a try. When you look into this cat poo coffee seriously, the coffee is made from coffee beans that go through the digest system of a cat call Luwak or civet. That means the cat eats the coffee bean, go through its stomach, comes out from its behind and people collects them and blend it for a fine expensive coffee. It’s still the coffee bean that is used, just that it goes through a cat body. The coffee is so expensive because of the amount of coffee able to produce using this process is limited. Perhaps the only way to increase the production of cat poo coffee is to breed more civet.

P/S : Even Jack Nickelson loves it. ( Check out the movie Bucket List )

International students, go to YouTube Edu and have a look at the US college that you plan to study.

YouTube Edu is a great place for international students to check out the US colleges. International students have the chance to see how the condition of the college they plan to go and at least have some idea what problems they may face. It’s really difficult to understand the situation and environment just by listening to others experience or looking at pictures and descriptions form brochures. A short video clips explains better then thousand words. Based on the video clips, international students can prepare themselves before getting on the plane and fly thousands of miles across the sea to an unfamiliar place for further studies. Seriously, it’s not just the study part that international students might face problems, it’s everything. Even little things like the air that they use to breathe in also might be a problem, things that they didn’t notice their existence but important suddenly becomes their enemy. In other words, international students might face some cultural shock issue.

Those of you that like to learn or maybe attend classes from your home can also check out YouTube Edu. There are several video clips with more than an hour of lectures available from varies topics. Perhaps if you miss a class of your course, you might be able to find it here. For those that interested in learning at home and don’t want to go to college, YouTube Edu might just be right for you. Best of all, it’s free.

Contest for Free Coffee for a year

For all coffee lovers, this is your chance to win yourself a year of free coffee. All you need to do is participate and win. Matt’s Wood Roasted Original Coffee is having a contest call Show Us Your Woodpile. Just take a picture of the wood that you’ll be burning and send it to them. By doing so you’ll get a chance to win yourself a year of free coffee from Matt’s Wood Roasted Original Coffee. You can check out the site and see the previous winners. In order to win the contest, you need to stack the woods so that it looks special. If you’re able to stack a castle with the woodpile, I’m sure you’ll have higher chances to win the contest. But that’s going to take a lot of time and some engineering basic so that your castle won’t collapse. Well, that’s just a suggestion. Most important of all, have fun with your family with the contest. For more details of the contest, check out the contest rules and details from the site. One thing that you need to take note is that this contest opens to residents of the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii only. Due date is November 15, 2009. So start planning and cutting those woods now.

P/S: This is the first time that I come by a coffee site with contest. It does seem interesting and fun. 1 year of free coffee, that’s a lot.

Coffee lover that loves coffee very much, or perhaps too much

Simple things that save you hundreds of dollars

I saw an article from yahoo about 7 things you’re wasting money on and I’m thinking this might just be the right time to start saving money, energy and stop wasting. According to the article, there are 7 things that we are or normally wasting money on it. They are:

1) Buy bottled water
2) Extended warranties
3) Gym memberships
4) Overdraft fees
5) Organic produce
6) Auto insurance
7) Music downloads

If you review all the 7 items above, you might be able to save at least couple of hundred dollars each month. Imagine if you drink water from tap, give up the extended warranties for the electrical products, do exercise outdoor instead of in the gym, spend less then you earn, consume regular vegetables, drive less and listen to radio. How much will you save each month by just doing that? If you don’t know how to do the math, just try it out for couple of month and see it yourself.

Actually there are a lot more that you can save if you really think about it. During this time of period as worldwide economic is not so good, many of us are considered lucky to still have a job. Picking up the habit of not wasting can affect lots of things. It also helps in improving the economic. Imagine if you starts saving and not wasting, you’ll save yourself some money. When you carry out this habit to work, you’ll help save company some money. When the company that you work at carries out this habit, society will save some money. When the society carries out this habit, the county will save some money. When the country has more cash, chances of creating more jobs and work opportunities can be done. Now imagine that each of us around the world starts to pick up the habit of not wasting. I’m sure if that happens, we should be able to walk out of this economic crisis in just a few months.

Speaking of saving and not wasting, you can help by just turn off your lights. In support of earth hour 2009, all you need to do is turn of your lights on 28th March 2009 for 1 hour from 8:30pm till 9:30 pm. For earth, this is to tell world leaders to take action against global warming. For you, consider this as a small simple step to start saving and not wasting. Turning off your lights for 1 hour might not save you a lot of money but it’s a start. Imagine if you do the same thing to your heater, air conditioner and other energy consuming products, then you’ll see a big difference. This is a small step for you but it’s a big step for the earth. In fact it’s a big step for each of us to preserve the earth for our next generation.

Real Kung Fu starts with coffee?

This picture that stats “Real kung fu starts with this” is actually a joke. The problem is I just don’t get it. I will appreciate it if anybody can tell me. I know that coffee doesn’t help with Kong Fu. I know that people that do Kong Fu might also love to drink coffee. I know that we start work right after we have a cup of coffee. That’s a wake up call. So we need to drink coffee first to actually do real Kong Fu? This I don’t get it.

Shopping at ShopWiki

It took me some time to get familiar with ShopWiki but the way that the site presented is very interesting. The site doesn’t seem like an online shop. It looks more like a search engine for products. You get to search for a particular product, for example printers, computers, keyboards or laptops and you’ll be show a list of products with different prices and different online shop. This is actually good for customers as we are shown lots of option and able to make comparison before placing orders. While searching for the products that we wish to purchase, customers are also introduce to many new online shops. Beside the new online shops, there are also other things too. The best thing about using shopWiki is that we are able to learn and study the products that we want to purchase. Take for example if I need to buy a laptop, it’s not just the list of products I get. I’m also shown a brief buying guide, recommended products, top picks products, tips on how to get the best, pros and cons and many other info to help me get the right laptop. That means before I choose and place my orders, I was shown how to get the right and suitable product for me.
The site only has a simple layout. It does a good job in providing customers lot of option, suggestion and comparison. It makes it easier to search for what we want.

Send an email to yourself in the future using WeeMail

From time to time there’s always something special or unusual popup from the internet. As for today I found this site call WeeMail that suggested we should remind ourselves on certain things by sending an email back to us in future. How do we do that? Simple, all we need to do is uses WeeMail and send an email back to us postdated. Interesting? Not really. First of all, there are a lot of similar reminding tools that we can use online. One good example is by using the schedule form My Yahoo. You just need to click on the date that you need to be reminded and before that day come, an reminding email will be send to you. Secondly the first thing that comes in my mind when I saw this site is that this might be a great tool for email spamming. If you check out WeeMail, you’ll find that all you need to do is fill up the email address, subject, message, date and the image verification to send out an email. The process is really simple for anybody to send out an email. The only thing that the site can do to try to stop email spamming is to filter each email one by one. There is no account to block and no users to blacklist. So I’m guessing spamming might be the biggest problem that WeeMail faces.

Seriously, I’m not so sure the concept of WeeMail works. The service provided is not unique and there is a problem of miss using as spamming. But any way, this might be a good brainstorming process as bloggers, like myself will judge and comment on it. Who knows this might leads to a good idea that benefits all.

Cheat sheets for designing programs

When we are using software, programming or applications such as Microsoft Office, Linux, Windows, AutoCAD, we tend to work as fast as possible. Thus, using shortcuts or hot keys becomes more frequent. The problem is we might not be able to remember all of them unless we use them often. That is why we try to make a list of hot keys or shortcuts on a piece of paper and stick it beside our monitor. That way we don’t have to remember all of the keys. Here’s a site that I found that gather 14 most useful web design cheat sheets. The 14 cheat sheets include Photoshop, CSS, XHTML, JavaScript Frameworks and Flash.

With the help of the cheat sheets you can work faster. That’s actually good as it’s efficient that we’re talking about. There’s nothing better than finishing the work as soon as possible.

Aliens Vs Coffee Machine

That’s really the kind of coffee machine that going to scare the hell out of people before even taste the coffee. I haven’t been taken a slip of coffee for around couple of weeks ever since I fall sick. The only thing that I’m a lot to have is only water, lots and lots of water. 3 days of high fever knock down everything that I got. It took about a week for me to regain my appetite and another week to regain my strength. Guess I have lots of things to catch up, especially things that happens online. Even so, I still can’t work long in front of the monitor. I still need more rest to get myself back to normal condition. Well, I’ll just have to do this one step at a time.

Personal Finance in your inbox

Speaking of calculation, I’ve been doing that a lot lately as the economic around the world is going crazy. Many things like oil, currency, stock market are going up and down. I’m sure many of us are getting sea sick and throwing out a lot. If you’re in debt with the bank because of your car loan, housing loan or maybe refinancing, you might just want to recalculate your financial status. In fact if you seriously want to calculate your personal financial, here’s a personal finance software form Rudder that you can try out. Yes, it’s free and you can try it out. This online money management rated as the best products in 2008 and the top real world web apps of 2008. It also features in CNBC, the wall street journal, TechCrunch and many other press. Unfortunately this software seems to be created to suit people that live in US. But then that doesn’t mean it can’t be use by others. As it’s a free service, it doesn’t hurt to try it out.

The one thing that we do every day is calculation

We calculate, the moment that we wake up we start calculate how much time we have for breakfast without getting later for work. We calculate how many days left before holiday and we calculate how much we earn. Furthermore we even calculate how much we have to earn in order to buy a house, a car, getting married, have kids, education, medication, vacation and most of all retirement. Seriously you might be able to get all the calculation done nicely or perfectly but the thing is it’s a never ending calculation. The equation changes as life goes on. Life is unpredictable and everything changes, the only thing that you can be sure about your calculation is right now at this moment. At the end of the day or after you wake up next day in the morning, the answer you calculated expires. New day new calculation, thus we keep on doing the math of our life.

Here’s an online converter that might be helpful if you’re always doing the calculation. It might not be that perfect but we can go for the best that we can get. The more calculation has been done the lower the risk or the safer the path.

Watching Grey’s Anatomy Online at Cucirca

Grey’s Anatomy is one of my favorite US television medical dramas. Several television channels in my country always compete to air the latest season of Grey’s Anatomy. In order to catch up with the latest viewing, I have to keep up with the channels competition too. Still if you’re not staying in the US, you’ll always be one season late. Lucky for those that have an internet broadband connection, we can almost have the first view of the latest episode right after the drama is air. The latest season of Grey’s Anatomy that I’m able to catch on my country is season 4. Currently I’m waiting for season 5 to be air but I don’t think that will be happened soon.

Dragging by my desire to continue my medical drama addiction, I did a quick search on Google to see if I can watch the drama online. It turns out the first site from Google search result is able to let me watch the drama online. The site is called Cucirca and has all Grey’s Anatomy seasons and some other famous US drama as well. Putting the legal issue about copyright aside we can see that as the speed of the internet connection is increasing, it is possible to have online video, which means television is not the only channel to watch your favorite movies or drama. You can watch it on your computer or laptop too.

No doubt that the possibility of watching the same television show online is there and it seems to happening now. The big question is how they can control the airing and copyright. This involves a lot of money and it won’t be easy. Even so this is a trend that can’t be stop as we all know that many already has access to all the latest movies and television drama as long as you know where to find them. Actually similar case happens before when the internet speed is fast enough to transfer a MP3 song. It shouldn’t be a surprise any more as it just a repeated incident. The difference is that how we make full use of it.

As for viewers around the world, it is great to be able to watch the latest season or episode of the Grey’s Anatomy.

Calculate your own personal financial report for free

Here’s a wealth manager that enable you to estimate and calculate your personal financial report. The Chat is simple. All you need to do is fill in your monthly investment, return in % and other expenses. The expenses are cars, property, education, wedding engagement and so on. You can just play around with it as the chat changes as you insert your investment and put up your expenses. You will be shown graphs of liability, investment and property assets. Calculations are between the ages of 30 to 85. It’s a simple estimation but at least this will gives you a brief idea on how your financial situation is. Many of us did not actually sit down and think about the money that is needed in future, or shall I say plan on the money that we earn for future usage. This is actually very important, especially you plan to get married and wanted to raise couple of kids. You need to actually calculate if you’re able to earn enough money for shelter, food and education. There is a video clip on the site that shows you how this wealth manager works. Have a look and try it out. This may give you a good start on how to budget and plan your personal financial.

StarBucks does not have my cup of coffee

If you’re going to have a regular cup of coffee, which coffee shop will you go for? If you ask me, I’ll say any normal coffee shop is better than StarBucks. That’s true and I’ll say it again. StarBucks is not on my list of regular good old black coffee to go for. Not to mention that their price of a regular coffee is way more expensive than others, it still doesn’t taste good. Unless I’m going for a cappuccino, latte or mocha, I might think about StarBucks. Seriously, it just doesn’t sound right for a famous coffee shop around the globe to not have a good regular cup of coffee.

If you’re not sure about this, just do a simple test. Gather 4~5 of your friends and each purchase a cup of coffee from various coffee shops including StarBucks. Change the paper cup so that all 5 cups of coffee looks the same. Of cause you need to do a marking so that you remember which cup of coffee is from StarBucks. Pick some of you friends to taste the coffee and decide which coffee taste better. I’ll bet you that coffee from StarBucks won’t turn out winner. The above test might just be too troublesome, to make it simple just buy a cup of regular coffee from MacD and StarBucks. Taste it yourself and you’ll know what I mean.

I saw an article about consumer reports picks the best cup o’brew from Yahoo and makes me wonder we might just paying too much for a cup of regular coffee. That’s my thought about the coffee that I tasted. How about you?

A human search engine

Most of you probably know what a search engine is. Couple of the most famous search engine is Google and Yahoo. Basically what you do is just type a keyword that related to the topic and you’ll get a list of sites. That’s just the beginning of what you really want to find. You have to check out each and every site in order to find what you want. Take for example if you’re looking for a information that related to cars and how to repair, most likely you’ll spend a lot of time searching online and probably won’t find the exact material.

Here’s a service that you might be interested if you’re not good with search engine. You can just let others to search for the things or info for you. At WeSeekIt or human power search engine, you can just tell them exactly what you look for and they do the search online for you. That’s right. Instead of you do the search online yourself, you let others do the work. It’s a new search engine power by humans. Try it out.

P/S: I think this site is good for those that are not familiar with search engine. Sometime you might spend hours in front of the monitor and might not find what you want.

When there’s no Coffee Break

During this economic crisis, no doubt that many companies will try to restructure their business to survive. Many actions such as lay off some workers, cut bonus, reduce pay, unpaid leaves are done to get through the crisis. No matter what companies do, don’t ever try to take out coffee break. Without coffee break, there might not be any productivity as situation below might occur.

Free Ebooks Magazine and Programming Books from BooksAIO

This is not the first time that I post about free ebook site. No doubt that there are lots of free material and free stuff online. The problem is where and how to find them. Some of the ebooks that you purchase online might just be free info scattered online. Some people take the time and effort to gather all of the info and compile it into a pdf file. Basically you’re just paying for the time and effort to gather the info. Next time do a search online before you purchase anything. You might be surprise with your finding. There are lots of treasures online. Just that it might takes some skill and knowledge to find them.

Here’s the site with lots of free magazines and programming books – BooksAIO. Enjoy.

Brand new and unique social network site Acobay

Add your stuff at acobay. Well, that's the first impression from the site. Acobay is actually a social networking site that allows others to share and connect. Just check out the stuff map for popular products, similar interest and many more. You're able to find information about the best or popular place to have fun, shopping and dining. It's kind of like other social networking site, just that acobay categorize it differently. The site actually gives a unique feeling with the way they categorizes stuff.

Free Alternative CAD software and other AutoCAD related info

Frankly speaking, I don’t know much about Auto CAD design software but I do know getting the software license is expensive. Not many people able to own one especially students. That is the reason why people starting to search for an alternative software to replace it. As long as you’re able to use the alternative software to achieve your goal, then it’s all it matters. No doubt that there are a lot of functions with the use of Auto CAD program. In many conditions we only use up 10%~20% of the functions and that’s really a waste. Here’s a few of the sites that I found might be useful for those of you that are in architecture and always in use of Auto CAD. I hope that these might come in handy.

CADdepot.com - CAD shareware, demos, free utilities and add-ons.
CADspan - creates 3D printable file from any CAD model.
3D Animation Workshop - 3D modeling tutorials, lessons and software reviews
CAD Corner - Architectural Auto CAD Details
Solid Components - 3D CAD drawings for design engineering

Turn your bath tub into a planetarium or deep sea ocean

What do you normally bring along when you’re taking a bath, a toy duck? Here‘s a product form Sega toys that you’ll love to have if you spend a lot of time in the bath tub - Homestar PRO - Home Planetarium. Check out the pictures and video clips below.

Like it? Here’s the best way that you can use this product. Homestar PRO - Home Planetarium, champagne and romantic music in bath tab. I’m sure you love one will enjoy spending time with you in the bath tab with that environment. Even if you’re still single and trying to get a special gift for a girl, I’m sure this will be a suitable one. Of cause you need to check if she takes bath or shower. For that I think you need to find a way to get that info. Asking her directly might not be a good idea.

Beside I think you can use Homestar PRO - Home Planetarium not just at the bath tub but any place as long as it’s a dark room. For sure you can easily create a romantic atmosphere with this small cub.