After a while, I managed to persuade colleagues from the marketing department to create Twitter account for the company. Several crew, such as comic magazine’s, had a presence already. So, the marketing department created not only one, but two accounts at @komikelex and @elexmedia. That completes the list of the company’s earlier internet presence.

• Website.
• Forum.
• Multiply.
• Facebook.
• Plurk.

There’s also GoodReads account in there somewhere.

I doesn’t follow all of them, but the strategy as I asked is a facepalm. The main media is the forum (SMF, need registration) and the other presences’ main purpose is to pull traffic to the forum. The other part of the strategy that annoys me is… the service I don’t like the most in the internet in relationship with SMB (short message broadcast, not small-medium business), Ping.fm and the sort. What’s the point in following all of the media, if they only spits out the same old record over and over again in all channels ? Besides, seeing such mass broadcast through that service, if I’m a follower in Twitter, I’d really doubt if the staff would be listening, or even watch their stream, or check their followers.

The content of the broadcast is no different than the multiply/blog either. It’s routine post of brochure-class press release, routinely that it really lost the meaning and interest in my opinion. When broadcasted through media like Twitter… really, as a follower, it’ll just like the flooder user who posted dozens of updates at once, burying everyone else’s updates; instead of just posting the important points. After all, if everything’s important, nothing’s important right ?
Thankfully seems like they’ve starting to tone down the self-centred advertisement tweets.

From the inside, editors are getting invited to participate. Well, for most, it’s just troublesome. The office’s internet is terrible, deadline is tight, and it’s not even in our job description (means we don’t get any gratitude from the company for doing it), worst case it’ll make the higher ups think we’re wasting time in the internet. Public relation job seems to be added into the marketing division’s jobs. Then, a theory from colleague. The aggressiveness of building internet presence might relate with internal scoring system. Anyway, that’s the internal talk.

I do got invited to the company’s CoTweet account, but only for the company’s. I’ve asked several times for the comic account to be added but the response are slow. Should I just go upstairs and borrow the computer to set it up ? *sigh*

One of the new features of Office 2010 is the paste option. This small menu will pop up most of the time if we pasted something to the document. The function is to help in deciding whether we want to paste a text with the same formatting as the source, or strip away all the styles. This remove the need to go to the Paste Special menu, it can even be accessed without having to move to the mouse.

The problem though, this option is activated using one of the most used non-alphabet key in the keyboard, Ctrl, which is also used to move cursor quickly between words. When doing quick typing, this could cause errors, which in worst case, left unnoticed.

It’s not like the it doesn’t tell us where to remove that option if we find it useless or pulling our fingers when typing; but here it is anyway. From the option, choose Advanced. and then the Cut, copy and paste (second group). It’s the “Show Paste Options button”.

Much better. Too bad the team doesn’t give it a less used key for shortcut, such as… right Shift or Ctrl button (after half-breaking my PC keyboard, I’ve just realized I almost never used the right side Shift and Ctrl.

An interesting idea from a commenter in the article.

So they're turning twitter into a global forum for everything in real time? Sounds pretty awesome. Just wait for the forum styled front ends to appear they should be brilliant.

Originally posted as a comment by Chris on Mashable - The Social Media Guide using Disqus.

It’s actually possible isn’t it ? The thing needed is a formal way to group the posts together to form a discussion threads, probably using hash tags.

The front end would just be a web based Twitter client, automatically entering a unique hash tag for each thread and keep a database to translate the random code into understandable title in the interface. Adding Twitter’s feature to “reply” and track which posts are replied, the forum could be flat and threaded.

Talking about possible, actually Hatena Haiku works as a cross between microblogging and forum. The architecture is different from Twitter though. In that site, it has “Title” field to specify the threads, and it has almost infinite text length, also supporting line breaks. That one has very low participant from outside Japan though.

How many peoples do you connect to actively? Compared to your address book, how much online, how much in real? In that respect, mine is very low, perhaps less that 10% of all contacts in my address book. In Facebook, the number is lower because I avoided befriending total stranger, or peoples that’s too close with me in real life.
But phone address book is different. It’s follow, or even hunting. Had a name card collection hobby (well, vCard, not paper card), saving the information into address book, then try to fill in the information as complete as possible.

These days, I saved those name cards in Live Peoples. It has almost all the field I’ll need (although the Live Messenger field still doesn’t accept non Hotmail/Live address) and being saved in the cloud, accessible everywhere internet is available. Even for feature phones, there’s a web interface, which although a lot slower than having the data stored locally, is still usable for rarely accessed contacts.

Having trouble with synchronizing my phone with the online store, I think this is a good time to start short listing my address book. As I mentioned before, I only interact directly with a small portion of my whole address book (phone call & sms), so lets start deleting.

1. Peoples I know I won’t make phone call to, such as foreigners. Excluding peoples I’d casually send e-mail while on the go and web services (e.g: TwitPic).
2. Peoples I won’t need to make phone call to, such as peoples I know and interact in online forums. Excluding peoples I need to call (e.g: peoples who get into community events organizing and contact persons).
3. Peoples I don’t really know anymore. This means really old acquaintance who I’ve lost contact with.

I’m still leaving sellers and translators and colleagues in it. But other than those, it’s not even 30 from 200+ peoples originally. I should get a life.

The aggregator for web activities in Windows Live seems to be acting up recently. StumbleUpon takes time, but my latest Digg and Last.fm updates seems to not pulled into my profile’s stream. In the other hand, Fotolog’s update includes entry already more than a week old.

Personally I hope this is a backend issue because of some maintenance or upgrade that will be improved with time. But ever since they roll out the latest wave of Web Activities, there’s almost no news about another services to be added in close time. This includes the Goodreads and Slideshare web activities.

Anyone else having issue with their Web Activities recently ?

The menu is gone… not strange considering the current condition and also the price of that oil for example. But still, it surprised me a bit when coming. I visited the place probably half a year ago (the part I remember being close to Halloween IINM). After long, I guess I want to pay another visit, that’s probably the strongest reason. But the owner is not there today, unlike the past two visits.

Cast that aside, I also had some time to check some stuff at the neighbouring shopping centre, the wireless routers for the house next door. Still cost much for me, somewhere around €35.8 each. 1TB hard drive is the same, seems like the enclosure option is still more expensive, not to mention questionable quality? Maybe not that far though.

Another thing is netbook. They doesn’t sell Kohjinsha brand there, at least can’t find one. But seems like no matter how small it is, most netbook’s width won’t shrink any slimmer to afford the “usable keyboard size”.

Doesn’t find a that much thing to take picture of.

By the way, it rained. Well, it rained when I visited my mother too, the type of hard shower that ended quickly. The second one is when I’m about to go home. Thanks to that one, I can’t get back by bus, although it only rained half way. Except the unprepared raise in expense, not that it matters a lot. Besides, the weather forecast said it’ll probably back to the terrible summer days again next week. If the weather is nice for the whole next week, that’ll be great.

Although not so sure, I think the InPrivate browsing feature from IE8 had a certain rule that ignore the rule set in the blocked site list.

This rule is… it doesn’t block the ads served from the same domain. For example, if I blocked www.google-analytics.com, I can still open the site. Or another example, even if I blocked www.mydomain.com/ads/.* I will still get the ads when visiting www.mydomain.com. Too bad actually because some forum I visited hosted the advertising scripts in their own server in a directory. InPrivate is limited to blocking files in at least another sub-domain or another site.

Clarification please…

One of the recent topic in Live Soapbox is… well, again, about Live Spaces and it’s limitation in building a personal space to express yourself, much like building a website.

Personally, Live Space for me is a blogging platform, and thus the most important part in it is of course the Blog module. Other sections are extra (Profile, Categories, Network) but in the end, no pages and such. Trying to make a usual site in Live Space would be like the late MSN Groups who designed complex mess with Pages, it looks like Frankenstein monster stamped in the middle of the MSN frame, no CSS, no HTML 4, no script.

Well, to each their own way of self-expression. In Windows Live, I did mine in two ways, the web activities, covered in Live Profile and the blog in Live Space. Like in Facebook, there are a lot of web gadget in the Live Gallery; although like other application gallery, seems like there’s more junk apps than killer apps. Most are just games, elaborate RSS reader, experiments, clocks, etc.

That raise the question of why bother with Live Space at all (modified from Greg’s question in the group).

• Integration of the commenting system with Windows Live and the feed.
• Integration with Live People and Live Profile.
• My stubbornness.
• Hope that it will become better later.

That aside, lately I enjoyed more time writing my daily life in Hatena (and practicing languages) rather than in Live Space. If after Wave 4 it still goes downhill, I guess it’ll be the time to leave to another platform finally.

But there is a way where Live Space should be able to move to. With the web gadgets, I think Live Space could be categorized as a “website of modules”. Why not grow it into a full-fledged CRM platform? Like Joomla, Drupal or the kind of it, Live Space already have the (albeit limited functionality) blogging and modules already.

• More official gadgets, for example Live Photo slideshow or Calendar (personal or group’s) & Events, file download using Skydrive.
• Gadgets using Azure platform, for gadgets that would need data storage or database, e.g: polls.
• Showing external content, such as Twitter or Youtube.

Some of these are already available in the Gallery actually.

For third party modules like widgets, I’m actually hoping the team could provide a mash up tool for themselves. Most of these widgets are just linking to specific script with parameters, which is then placed in either the page body or header. The team should be able to verify request from users for a widget, and then create a quick module for verifying the input (user-specific parameter) and then put the code into Space, giving chance to use those Widgets without risking rouge scripts.

Community for theme creation could also grow. Imagine, Gallery with various design where most of the comments would be “this sucks”, “it doesn’t work with [xxx] gadgets”, “the script crashes”, “it breaks my space”, etc. At least other user would know that one doesn’t work before they activate it.

The problem with that is… the argument that it will cost too much for Microsoft if they’re becoming a free website host with size as huge as Live Space.

[Edit][2009-07-19]: Change some words and add more ideas.

Yesterday morning, two bomb exploded in Jakarta’s Kuningan area, specifically, Ritz-Carlton and JW Marriot hotel building.

The bomb in Ritz is actually more painful to certain entities than the others. This weekend, there’s a planned event, Manchester United will come to Jakarta and have a match with the national team (IINM, today they had one in Malaysia). Cellular operator Three (owned by Hutchinson) who become the main sponsor of this event has prepared a lot of publicity. But because of the bomb, well… the visit is cancelled. Estimated from the ticket alone the loss is about 50 billion (Indonesian Rupiah).

Now for the reaction. I missed the press conference show on TV, but the movement can be seen in places such as Twitter, for example the #indonesiaunite, the red and white cause in avatar and the “we are not afraid” campaign. From several peoples I followed, there seems to be a renewed wave of nationalism expression, although who knows for how long, until it became “yesterday’s news” and cools down.

The effect of this explosion is rather silent though, doesn’t seems like many things changed today, but this could also be because I’m resting the whole day because of flu.

Personally for me though, not interested in adding colour or badge to my avatar. Quoting… TechCrunch(?) in the Iran election event, it just show where your peripheral focus is currently at. Well… it’s a trending topic, and maybe that’s all. In forums and Facebook, some of the more emotional contacts seems to take the chance to start cursing and making snappy comments on the terrorists.

So, why can’t I just enjoy sending curses to the terrorists and react in highly emotional way regarding this event? Like the others.

Tapping my monitor screen loudly, not to the verge of breaking of course.

My work computer still uses CRT screen, still no budget to upgrade to LCD screen it seems.

Here’s the interesting part. Playfully knocked the screen with my finger (like knocking door) with my face close. The sound from behind the screen is… interesting. It sounds like an echo room probably as wide as a hangar or warehouse.

There’s echoes from inside, with higher tone than the knocking. Vacuum tube ?

Put wide LoL smilies here. Anyone might know if there’s such service somewhere in the deep… web of the world wide web?

Realization tracker for schedule. Much like the sleep tracker. The concept is, someone fill in their calendar (or import from other service) and then at the end of the day, fill in the realization.

Example:

• Plan: meet with friend on 12:00.
• Realization: meet with friend on 13:00.
• Excuse: fell asleep and nobody’s waking.

Private publishing tracker. For writer to publish ongoing work. The features includes:

• Commenting system, with option for message from author (for example: the author want to limit current session for critic on specific language use).
• Online editing tool as well as upload option supporting popular file formats. Author could also write update, but keep it private (not publishing it to the public yet).
• News feed, for the author to inform there’s an update. Automatic is fine too, but I’d also like to see the authors had the option to tell their readers when they’ve finished the latest update, especially for those editing online.
• Bookmark tool, for readers to know where they last read the story. Also for the writer, so they can mark from where the latest story starts.

Willingness to use if there exist: none.

Sometime, it’s hard to talk about something. One factor is disparity of information, where someone had information, and part other got no single idea what that other party is talking about. Felt it sometimes when I raised a topic or news and the others had not yet get information of it.
The case usually go around the more obscure facts, or the news hasn’t reach the usual popular English language news channels. Well, vice versa when they start talking about figures and merchandises.

Other time, they just think it’s too bothersome to talk about. Like when someone pushed an information to the discussion forum, then everyone just… too bothersome to discuss, lets just goes on fapping.
This means, lets post scan, or figure, or any collectibles, then doing fanboy cheers. Frankly, listening it is mentally taxing.

Doing news post hit-and-run in the forum is annoying enough, but changing a topic that can be used for sharing information into place to just repost pictures from various image gallery site is just so… can’t find the word to say it, maybe “regrettable” would do.

Completely into noise chamber.

Of course, there is the… saturated factor. After being too long in the community, feeling that you’ve done those and is getting too old to be all jumpy, too old to play with the echoes; not to mention someone else has already mentioned your point in better words that if you speak, it feels like beating the dead horse.

Last Monday, I had a new toy to waste the boring time.

Not really a toy in usual sense anyway, just a text editor and a “rulebook” to play with. It’s called FOAF.

Just like my habit for trying out different sites as well as aggregator, this thing is really interesting. I could define almost all the usual identity attributes.

Let’s see… the usual name, nickname, birthday, gender, phone, e-mail.
We also had some joke-attributes such as DNA hash code.
Website for company and projects done (instantly made me think of the peoples working in internet work groups).
The online properties had usual homepage, weblog, and branches that define online accounts and chat accounts.

The part I hasn’t explore is the Knows section, defining the list of peoples I know. Too long, no thanks (^ー^;;)

Search engines, such as Google (IINM) scan the foaf.rdf file linked to index someone’s identity, I wonder about Bing.

I imagine this would be handy in the vast online profile sites. For example, we could register using OpenID and then the consumer could pull this identification definition file from the server, or even pull the update periodically to keep the information in sync between sites. After all, 15–20 online profile might not be enough to have during a frenzy.

Other than that, because the file could also list online services, aggregator should be able to use the information to fill in the list of accounts.

Next time, maybe I’ll try and check for CSS3 :D

With tabs, the file I wrote yesterday is 9,693 bytes, excluding the Knows. Had lot of personal information, but I still think more can be included.

vpegudmkwf

What size is small enough to not shy out? I mean for notebook computer. I often bring along my 12” notebook in messenger bag to build up skeletal problem for my later age, but to take it out doesn’t prove to be as easy. 12” is already quite small, borderline to the current netbook class at 10” max. It’s still big and I could only took it out in more quiet place and of course, settled down. Doesn’t feel comfortable to be the only person who use it in the room.

I needed smaller device, that I can casually pull out everywhere, even while standing. From all the form factor available today, I guess the Vaio P is the great form factor. Seven inches screen and not much space wasted for the bezel. That size, I think I can pull it out everywhere and still won’t really attract attention. It also has the instant on feature. The problem is on the price of course.

Other than not standing out in the crowd, what do I need anyway? A wider keyboard, internet browser and office document editing. So, why don’t I just use the like of Celio Redfly? Two reasons. First, the device doesn’t seems to be available in Indonesia. Second… it lacks one very critical MS Word feature I need, styling and document structure (Heading, Body text, etc).

Browsing to other UMPC sites, Kohjinsha seems interesting. The price through parallel import is around… Rp.4.5M.
The dimension compared:

• Vaio P : 245 × 120 × 19.8.
• Kohjinsha SH : 227 × 170 × 33 (Δ -18 × 50 × 13)

Too bad that it doesn’t have any stripped down instant-on interface when there’s not enough time to load into Windows. By the way, my Q3 and Q4 looks bad.

PS: watched Office 2010 the movie just now. Laughed out loud when seeing the cast names announced, Clippy’s grave, and the best line in for me is this though:

Where’s the font?
Between Arial… and Wingdings.
Wingdings!? Hah!

Well, that and the Winner of Redmond Local Movie Award. or “another IT Guy”.

A man and his friend came in for lunch in the new and cheap restaurant.

Customer: any recommendation?
Waiter: yes sir, this menu *points to a dish in the menu book*
Customer: great! I’ll have that.
[Dish in]
Customer: taste awesome.
Friend: the one next door tasted better.
Waiter: but they’re more expensive.
Customer: yeah, damn capitalist. I still have to pay for the electric bill you know?

[Next day]
Waiter: today, we’ve improve our menu. We added salt to the fish.
Customer: wow! It tasted even better!
Friend: you could just ask them yesterday, you know?
Waiter: we don’t have salt yesterday, but we listen to our customers.
Customer: hey, it’s cheap, I can’t be too picky.
Friend: as you wish.
Customer: listen, if you’re so picky, why don’t you go to that five-star restaurant instead?
Friend: you forget? My wallet is shallower than yours.
Customer: so you understand?
Friend: I understand that I had my right to complain and demand more.
Customer: no you don’t. Now just blank your mind, and accept the new innovation as great. The sooner you get used to it, the better you’ll feel. It’s cheap after all, can’t ask for more.
Waiter: I do agree ma’am. The food is your privilege, not our obligation.

[After that]
Customer: you know… maybe I should threat my electric company. If just there’s a free electric company somewhere.
Friend: you’ll toast your mainboard and get millions of dead-tree spam.
Customer: I can live with that, besides, I had some cheap enough measures to lower the risk. Everything should be free.

Just like translator groups and I’m feeling like the colonization/independence war era Indonesian artists.

As mentioned in Twitter, I almost got my wallet, camera and phone stolen today in the bus when going back from work, somewhere between Palmerah and Slipi. But according to statement from fellow passenger, seems like their hunting ground goes to the Grogol or Latumenten area too (PS: I also noticed that Yahoo maps in Flickr also had more complete Jakarta street maps compared to Bing Maps).

I think I’m lucky for several factors, in which the most crucial being that they’re not hunting in larger group, or apprentice training. The group consist of around three to four peoples, but I’m taking regular bus, so I guess there is the limit compared to large bus. This made it more difficult to spread the stolen objects to their friends to avoid being checked.

The MO itself is the most basic rule in the book. Distraction. I think this is a lot easier to do than the magician-like sleight-of-hand trick where the criminal can steal thing without getting noticed by the victim. The distraction used are standard too, which is semi-intimidation. They create an issue about gang fight and that they’re doing sweeping now. Of course, to keep the victim intimidated, they also mentioned about someone who “show no respect” got pulled down and heaven know what act of violence happened. The fact that a story of inter-ethnic gang fight and such public act of violence sounds believable is the ironic part though, about this city (^_^;;)

I’m kind of lucky to notice (albeit unconsciously) when they start wanting to check my belonging including my bag. They also do some physical moves of trying to block my view to my bag, which is in the hand of one of their member. The other member kept raising voice trying to intimidate and pacify the victim. Now, something new here is that they want to seal my bag as “a sign for their friend that this person is checked”. The true reason is of course, to keep the victim from noticing anything gone from the bag before they got away. I asked for a re-check of my belonging, in which luckily one of them panicked and said I “dropped” my wallet and camera then returned it, while trying to steal away my phone (which again, I luckily noticed).

The other good factor is that, they’re not in any motivation to do real violence (e.g: sharp weapons). This is a success-or-retreat attempt of robbery.

Despite so, I still prefer taking bus. No worry about parking, no worry about changing direction, no worry about traffic jam, and no worry about buying gasoline. Also, from my experience, such crime in bus is like airplane crash. From my probably thousand times to ride that public transport ever since a friend taught me about the directions during my high school year, I only had two of such case, in which both luckily failed. But like plane crash, when one happen, we always want to make a big thing about it, such as… that five paragraphs up there.

Finished one job, but I think I’ll take my time and rest until 16.30 which is not that far away. So, time for a not so meaningful thing.

06.57 – 07.10 is roughly 13 minutes apart, quite consistent with the usual range.

The street is split in… about 3 sections, according to line-of-sight and excluding the last spurt from the marketplace. Each sections are, 3:6:2:1, including the omitted section for the sake of inconsistency.

Peculiar pattern here is, either by fatigue, wind generated by traffic, position of the sun in relative to time or the buildings, the wet part starts on the third section.

Well, 15 minutes and sweats for 20 cents. Might be too expensive, but for 0.05×20 (adds up to 1) is quite a good deal, not to mention I do need more exercise. Keep the catching cold risk aside. :P

Final count for the day… from 4, 1 down, 4 to go.

Today is the presidential election day in Indonesia. Probably as a service to the majority worker class, the election is held during weekday. With the reasoning of want to fulfil the duty of a good citizen, it would be difficult to get to working place in the morning, thus offices are mostly closed like national holiday. Yes, we had a one day vacation.

The election itself is not too interesting for me in term of an event. From before the campaign start, there’s already a favourite candidate that are having great lead compared to the other candidates, well, just like my feeling about the latest election in USA, the most likely result is already visible from long before the election even starts. So, unless there’s something surprising like in Iran, I guess this would be an uneven race where the winner is clear from the beginning.

There’s also several promotion that ride on this event. For example, by showing the mark that we’ve participate in the election (in Indonesia, a fingertip is dipped in ink as mark), we can get a (small) glass of milk coffee from Starbucks free. Some other restaurant also offered discount and one offered free meal (though we all know there must be a catch somewhere). Talking about the ink, these days the ink used are simple stamp ink that are easily washed away. I think in the past, they used the more expensive thing like protein reagent that react with the skin and staining the cells in the surface. Not sure though, as long as I remember electing, I never get that kind of ink.

After that, went to check my notebook computer. The mainboard is fried so the service centre needed long time to re-stock the parts, in which during that time I’ve get myself a new unit. The shop owner agreed to buy my old unit as second hand item to resell with a price. But the cost of the repair itself already took more than 30% of the re-sell price. *sigh*

But my guessing is right. My father said I should call to confirm if they had business today. I speculate, remembering the face of the owner, I think he’s the type of person who rarely took his day off and rather had his employee came today even if they’re a bit late. So there, one problem done, and I still kept my old notebook’s 6 cells battery as spare unit. They’re compatible.

Cancelled the plan for dinner in an Italian restaurant I visited last week due to certain circumstances. The plan is then shifted to a vintage restaurant. This restaurant is located in an old house retaining the architecture from time of the Dutch East-Indies colonization era.

Most other buildings are destroyed to bring in buildings with more modern architecture that’s give more space in more floors, and more minimalist design so the cleaning and maintenance cost lot less than the old more decorative designs. Since this one is changed into a restaurant, it’s well decorated with a lot of memorabilia. Photos, maps, household utilities, etc. They even have plaques from shop or street that’s not used anymore.

There’s also old piano and gas lamp too. Interesting and romantic place in my opinion. ^-^