Dilbert (Again!)

Some people gave a stronger reaction to the minus points of Dilbert's face lift, especially on the first two.

Btw, here is the old layout for those who misses it.

Dilbert and Friends Underwent Plastic Surgery

A well-known guru for self improvement of IT-and-management got a total face lift.

Plus:

• strips are in color
• animations (new)

Minuses:

• pages are more crowded compared to the old, plain version
• more Flash usage!
• Animation pages refuse to work in Linux (web-browser = Firefox 3.0 beta 5)

Door to Door: an Unpleasant Experience

I've just recovered from a sickness; my brain hasn't been fully functional. So do excuse me if I looked/sounded a bit peking (e as in the, i as in king. It's a Pontianak Malay's word for crazy). Ah, yes! A rather long winding way to just say that I want to rant.

So, here's the situation. Normally, I'd take a bus to a particular destination, and the overall trip takes about 1 hour. Overall means walk to lift, go down and walk to bus stop (10 mins), wait for a bus (5-15 mins), time spent on a bus (30-35 mins), alight and walk to the destination (10 mins).

Yesterday I needed to arrive at the same destination before 10am. Since I was still in the recovery mood, I stepped out from my house at about 9:15am. “Ah, I'll be late if I take a bus” was what I thought. So, I duly decided to take a taxi, hoping to reach my destination before or exactly at 10am despite a higher expense. Which is a fair expectation, isn't? Afterall, taxies are supposed to be more mobile and deliver faster than busses.

Nope! Big no no! Not at all! No, no, and no! Have I said no?!?!?!?

First, I waited for a taxi at the entrance of my house complex. See, it took 5 mins to walk from the house's entrance to the lift, go down, and then walk to the entrance of the complex. After failing to get a taxi for about 10 mins, I took a 5-min walk to a taxi stand in a plaza and reached there at 9:30am. Yes, a plaza (BPP — Bukit Panjang Plaza). Actually it's very close to the bus stop I usually used, but still I decided to take a taxi in a (soon-to-be-proved) vain hope to arrive a.s.a.p.

The problem was, it took another 35 mins to finally board to a taxi (i.e. 10:05am). And this was after compulsively pressing the call button many many times. And mind you, there're other travelers waiting there as well. Of course, once boarding to the taxi, it took only 15 mins to reach my destination. The cost? SGD 8.8, nearly 7x the cost of taking a bus (SGD 1.29).

Now, I deliberately leave this till the end: I arrive at my destination at almost 10:30am. This was even later than had I decided to take a bus. Madness! How can it be?! Taxies are supposed to be superior in their delivery time, provided we're willing to pay! But how is it that the total, door-to-door time from my house's door to the destination's door (i.e. the meeting room) was the same?!?!? And yet, I still paid 7x of the cost of busses!!!!

Grrmph $%^#&@%&$@&(*&(#@$@@#

Blokkal: a Blogging Client

Blokkal is a blogging client that supports multiple protocols and blogging sites. Think of it as an alternative to web browsers in creating-and-editing blog entries. Blokkal's features include posting new entries into multiple blogs at the same time.

• Pro: cross-platform; it'll be available for Windows in addition to UNIX. Why? Because the latest version is for KDE 4 and KDE 4 is slated to run on Windows.
• Cons: no WSYIWYG HTML editing (whops, so many cryptic capital letters). This simply means that we won't get the typical experience of editing using a web browser:
  
  
  Instead, we'll be directly working with the HTML source code:
  
  

[FYI, this entry is completed using a web browser (i.e. the WYSIWYG editing route). Yes, I've been pampered with its convenience. But rest assure that Blokkal can really upload entries to your blog; this I've tested.]

Supported protocols:

• Blogger 1.0 (http://www.blogger.com)
• Blogger/GData (the recommended protocol for http://www.blogger.com)
• LiveJournal (http://www.livejournal.com)
• MetaWeblog API (http://www.wordpress.com)
• MovableType

Before we can use Blokkal to create/edit blog entries, we need to let Blokkal know about our blog account. Let's take a look at how to let Blokkal know about a Blogger blog — the technical way of saying this is “to add a Blogger blog into Blokkal”:

1. Start Blokkal, then “Settings” -> “Configure Blokkal”, and then “Add...”.
   
   
   
2. Select “Blogger/GData...” from the protocol list, then click “Next”.
   
   


3. Enter your Google's username on field “User Name”. Normally, if you have abcd@gmail.com, then your Google's username is abcd. Then, click “Next”. [Note: there's no need to touch field “Account Name”.]
   
   


4. Click “Finish”. If “Connect now” is checked, a new dialog will request for the account's password which is required to connect to the newly added blog.