Twitter

I’ve been playing around with Twitter a bit more lately and have started following the people who followed me (I have no idea how they found me) as well as some other big names, including the king of Twitter himself.

It’s definitely the case that the moment you start following 20 or more frequent Twitter users, the SMS notification is the first thing you turn off if you want to avoid going stir-crazy. I’ve switched to IM notification which is waaaayyyy better and less intrusive. And much more intuitive for replying to tweets (it takes too many key presses on a phone to get to the ‘@’).

Find your polling station

The Election Commission has updated their online electoral roll with polling station information. Go find out where you’re supposed to vote when polling day comes along.

Don’t forget to note down your polling stream as well as it’ll tell you which polling room you’re supposed to queue. If you forget, don’t worry as you should be able to look it up again at the polling station when you validate your IC with the EC officers, although my memory is a bit hazy.

I’m not too sure what that serial number is for.

Billi Lim the Epic Fail Guy

Billi Lim Peng Soon, one of the regular freak-shows since the 1999 General Elections, makes his expected appearance in the Star today in not one but two separate articles.

He likes to bill himself as the Dare to Fail guy but I personally prefer to call him EPIC FAIL GUY since he didn’t do too great when he burst into the political scene like a smelly pimple in 1999.

P108 – BUKIT BINTANG (1999)	Turnout: 38027 (60.5%)
Fong Kui Lun (BA – DAP)	19115
Lee Chong Meng (BN – MCA)	17981
Lim Peng Soon (IND – IND)	198

He did worse in 2004.

P120 – Bukit Bintang (2004)	Turnout: 39640 (60.9%)
Fong Kui Lun (OPP – DAP)	19103
Tan Chew Mooi (BN – MCA)	18799
Wee Choo Keong (OPP – MDP)	1107
Billi Lim Peng Soon (IND – IND)	132

So he’s actually trending downwards in each election that he takes part in. At this rate he’ll be getting negative votes in the 2017 General Elections. So why bother about him at all? Any Malaysian should be free to contest as long as they’re eligible and can afford to fork out the RM10,000 deposit, right? At least that’s what I thought until:

“Anyway, I have not yet decided on standing this time but, if I do, my campaign will be out of this world, something out of the box,” said Lim, who admitted that standing for elections was also good publicity for him and his books, including the saleable Dare to Fail.

Two words for Billi Lim. F**k you.

Our country’s political process is not an advertising platform for you to pimp your books. It’s not a mine of anecdotal material for you to use in your motivational seminars. Do the constituents of Bukit Bintang and the rest of the country a favour and stay out this time. It’s one thing to contest elections with good intentions when you have zero chance of success, but it’s quite another when you happen to make a few bucks on the side from the free publicity that you get.

As if the news about DAP Perak’s implosion wasn’t depressing enough.

Doctor shakes hand

.. and diagnoses rare brain tumour.

The GP said he knew something was wrong when he shook Mr Gurrieri’s large, spongy feeling hand.

Mr Gurrieri underwent tests and was found to have acromegaly – a tumour in the pituitary gland which causes overproduction of growth hormone.

The condition is seen in just three people per million, and can have serious effects if left undiagnosed.

Eat your heart out, Dr. Gregory House.

Indiana Jones Trailer

I can’t embed the trailer here because WordPress eats puppies when it comes to embedding any video other than Youtube, so click here instead to watch it.

The first minute of the trailer is meh, but then at 1:02, the music starts. That beautiful music. And I’m 13 years old again, watching The Last Crusade in the darkened theater of Sentosa Cinema, while hoping that the wet stuff that’s flowing around my shoes is from a leaky bag of kopi peng and not from a baby’s bladder.

Feist – I Feel It All

Did the lack of fireworks for this year’s Chinese New Year holiday get you down? Then stick your face really close to your monitor and hit the play button on Feist’s latest video from The Reminder. It’s just like you were right there with her as she runs around synchronized fireworks in between her little dancing jigs and air piano hands.

Feist lost out to Amy Winehouse for Best New Artiste and Best Album in the recent Grammy Awards, but heck, who cares anyway since the Grammys have become pretty irrelevant in the last decade or so. But that’s a rant for another day.

Gong Xi Fa Cai!

While you’re having fun ushering the Year of the Earth Rat, spare a thought for the rats in Thailand.

The rats are drowned and sold uncooked or ready to eat, with happy customers purchasing rat meat for as much as 150 baht ($4.82; £2.30) a kilogram.

“It’s better than chicken,” one customer told the AP news agency.

PicLens

PicLens has got to be the coolest Firefox plug-in that I’ve seen in a while.

It presents images from Flickr (as well as several other websites) in a style similar to Coverflow and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t look pretty. The screen shot above is PicLens in action with my Flickr photos and it looks even more impressive when it’s in motion.

Install the plug-in and give it a try. Definitely one of the few Firefox plug-ins that looks pretty while being useful and functional at the same time (it makes searching for that one particular photo so MUCH easier). I would wager that it looks better than the Flickr browsing function in Apple TV.

Photobucket, Picasa, Google Images and Facebook are among the other sites that are supported. Below is a shot of a Google image search for ‘bacon hot dogs’.

Book Rental Store

Genius.

Opposition

With this election cycle looking to be the most favourable for Malaysia’s opposition parties, you’d think that they’d be smart enough to not step on each other’s toes?

Not so.

Not surprisingly, DAP and PKR are at it again. This is a repeat of 2004 where the parties haggled over the right to contest Ipoh Timur, now held by Opposition Leader and DAP stalwart Lim Kit Siang.

Idiots.