1. What is your name: May
2. A four Letter Word: Moon
3. A boy’s Name: Michael
4. A girl’s Name: Marilyn
5. An occupation: Manager
6. A color: Magenta
7. Something you’ll wear : Marc Jacobs + Maybelline
8. A food: Mutton + Mashed Potatoes (Moon Cake + M&Ms for dessert)
9. Something found in the bathroom: Mat + Medicine cabinet
10. A place: Melbourne
11. A reason for being late: Malaria or Mad cow disease
12. Something you’d shout: Mwahahaha!
13. A movie title: Me, Myself & Irene
14. Something you drink: Mocha
15. A musical group: Muse
16. An animal: Mongoose
17. A street name: Maunicau Rd (ok not exactly a street)
18. A type of car: Mini Cooper (Mr. Bean’s car) or Mini Bus
19. The title of a song: My Life Would Suck Without You, My Heart Will Go On
20. A verb: Motivate

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1. SDLC – Software Development Lifecycle … what’s the point? (part 1 of many)
2. SDLC – Software Development Lifecycle … closer look at basics (part 2 of many)
3. SDLC – Software Development Lifecycle … exploring common models (part 3 of many)
4. SDLC – Software Development Lifecycle … agility strikes back with energy (part 4 of many)
5. SDLC – Software Development Lifecycle … is prototyping part of the good, the bad and/or the evil? (part 5 of many)
6. SDLC – Software Development Lifecycle … analyzing the battle ahead (part 6 of many)
7. SDLC – Software Development Lifecycle … designing the blueprint (part 7 of many)
8. SDLC – Software Development Lifecycle … testing, the moment of truth (part 8 of many)
9. SDLC – Software Development Lifecycle … flashback, component-level design principles (part 9 of many)
10. SDLC – Software Development Lifecycle … Visual Process & Estimating (Guessing) Software Deliverables
11. To scrum or to Run … that is the agile question? (new)
12. —
    

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via: stevecla

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Kinda silly, why all must use Macs but anyhow…I never plan to be one anyways.

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We (brother and I) have opened a joint saving account at ANZ main branch early August (18th to be exact). I’ve asked the lady who opened our account when we will get our ATM cards; she said “should arrive to you post box after two days”. I knew when they say two days that means two weeks with added “Fiji Time” but I wasn’t worry about it as long as I get the cards after two weeks.

We usually check our post box three or four times a week and there wouldn’t be a week we forget to check it. I was anticipating the cards should arrive after two weeks but no sign of them, not even a note to collect from their branch after four weeks. So, on 17th Sept, I looked for some contact details on the ANZ Fiji website and used the general enquiry form to email regarding the lateness of our cards.

They responded my email after 25min, requesting the account number as they were having some problem with the system and could not search by name, which was surprisingly fast and I was happy about their prompt service. After I sent the account number, the “Electronic Business – Fiji (ebusfj)” forwarded our cards numbers to “EBS HelpDesk HUB” asking for the cards’ despatch date as “ebusfj” couldn’t retrieve the action date due to the difficulties on beam (whatever the beam is).

“ESB HelpDesk Hub” then replied that both cards were posted out on the 28/08/09 to our post box. I replied them confirming the post box number is correct and we never received the cards. Local mails should not take that long and I wondered the cards were sent from overseas. I then requested for their advice on what action to take.

“EBS HelpDesk Hub” did not explain why the cards did not reach us or where they were sent from. But they replied “the only action we can take now is to order new cards for both of you. Please advise if we can proceed with this request.” Of course, what else should I have done since that’s the only advice they gave, so I gave a green flag, go ahead, order away; and asked how long will those take this time. They replied saying the orders have been placed, both cards and pins can be collected on Wednesday the next week.
Okie! I was all cool about it, I shall get my cards next week. Now, this is where the major problem starts.

On Friday 18th Sept, the cards reached our box. I was a bit confused; I thought we were suppose to pick up from the main branch; anyhow I did not mind receiving them in our box. On 22nd Sept, I prepared to pick up our pins at the branch and before doing so, I happened to logon to internet banking page and check my balance online. There was $10 shot in my balance.

I told my brother, who is the joint partner of the account, what to do about it but the arse ignored me and tell me to forget about it as it’s only a merry 10 bucks. I disagreed, arguing it was unacceptable to waste money like that and we should do something about it. I then realized that it definitely was not a merry 10 bucks but added consequences we might have to suffer for his so called merry 10bucks. We might lose on the monthly interest as the nature of this particular saving account only gives interest if we deposit each month and do not make a single withdrawal. The thoughtless brother did not seems to realize it and even fought with me for fussing and picking on him.

With no help from him, I had to take things into my own hand and sent the following mail to “EBS HelpDesk Hub” and “ebusfj”.

Hello XX,
Thanks for the help.
I’ve received the cards in my post box last Friday; it has 17th Sept 09 stamped on it.
It is very clear that ANZ has never sent the cards on mentioned date ie. 28/08/09.
With these new orders you just made, you have charged $10 stating: 21/09/2009 DEBIT REPLACEMENT DR CARD FEE 18/09/09 on my account.

It is very unfair and unacceptable that you charge us for your insufficient service.
I can bring the stamped envelope and letter as an evident to you to prove that you only sent our cards after I made this email enquiry on the 17th Sept.
It is not our fault that you delay your posting but why must we be charged for your lack of commitment?
I demand that you do something about this unfair charges and like to have my $10 back!
We do not need extra cards and only requested what we should have received 3 weeks ago.
If you have sent us the cards as promised date, we would not have wasted our time emailing back and forth plus this kind of situation would never happen.
Failure to provide the service is very unprofessional and on top of that charging customers for your failure is unacceptable.

Tomorrow I’ll have to come collect the newly order cards + PIN and like to talk to relevant personnel for this matter.
Kindly let me know who to talk to in order to explain this situation and make a proper complaint.
I must say, trying to claim back this merry $10 seems foolish but this is very important to point out ANZ lack of professionalism in their services and customer care department.

Regards,
May

PS. I forgot to mention that due to this implication, I might lose on my monthly bonus interest fee since Fast Saver account requires no withdrawal in a month to have a bonus interest rate. So, please take this matter very seriously and let me know the best solution to solve this.

After that I had to shoot two emails before they replied me admitting that it was their mistake.

“EBS HelpDesk HUB” replied:

Hi May,

Thank you for your email.
I sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused.
Could you please provide your account number so that we can attend to the reversal of your card fee today.

“Electronic Business – Fiji” replied:

Hello May,

This is an error on our part and we apologise for the inconvenience caused. We will confirm once the reversal is carried out.
As for the interest for the month of September, we will manually calculate this and credit your account by the end of the month.

Kind regards
XX

Alright great, as long as they know their mistake and fix it the next day. But I have my doubt that the implications in Fiji never resolve that easily. So I waited for end of the month to check my account balance again. And of course, I was right about never resolve easy part. Here is what I saw in my account and what I emailed them on 1st of Oct.

Hello XX or YY,
Could you check my account again and explain why the promised action has not been performed?
You haven’t fixed my interest manually as you mentioned in the previous mail and on top of that you have charged $5 for withdrawal fee.
I like to know what that withdrawal fee is about and why there is no interest added to my account.
I have deposited $__ on 1/09/09 and made no withdrawal the whole month, which means I’m entitled for 5.25% interest rate September.
Now, kindly explain why in the name is wrong with all those transactions shows on my account and how to fix all those mess up!!!
Please see the attached screenshot. I would like this fixed by today and don’t want to keep wasting my time following up this issue again next month.

Thanks.
May

I got no respond from them after a few hours. So I made a call and as expected, the phone service was worse than the emailing. The call handlers were very impatient or rather rude about it and never listen to what I have to say but keeps putting me on hold and transferring among themselves. After 5th round of transfers, they won’t even say Hello anymore as they recognized my voice and put me on a long wait. I got so fed up had to hang up.

So, I shot another email:

Hello,

I called this number: 679 3213 000 and asked for one of you and they keep transferring me back and forth, putting me on queue for more than 10min and I got no one to talk to in the end hence hung up. This is outrageous!
Could you give me the direct contact number or person full name to talk to regarding this issue please.
You should at least help me properly on this part as nothing has been working out well with contacting anz via emails.

They then replied:

Hi May,
We are working on your interest today as its the 1st of October since we need to sight all your transactions from 01/09/09 to 30/09/09 respectively. We will advise you by EOB once the credit is done.
Regards

To reply to that, I sent:

And plz explain what is that $5 withdrawal fee is about.
I also need a direct contact person name and phone number.

Ebusfj replied and explained:

Hi May,
Please call my direct line on (___)_____ and I will assist you.
Thanks
XX

———–

Hi May,

The $5.00 fee will be reversed as well as it was the result of the second debit on the account (Acess card fee)
Regards
XX

Since, she’s care enough to respond my emails, I gave her a chance to do her job and planned to wait till end of the day to check on the account again.

During this time, I had to go to ANZ for another matter and happened to meet the Branch Manager Sales. I was not there to see him in the first place but to see another personnel.

The personnel I went to see has yet another bad attitude such as making annoying/impatient faces and tassking at me on my previous visit. She ignored me, who made a prior appointment with her before coming, and carry on chatting on the phone joyfully, then 5 more minute doing her own business after hanging up her phone. She saw me waving at her and she waved back; even after, she carries on ignoring me. I’m not sure if she was waiting for me to jump up and down insanely or call out to her to grab her attention. Finally when I get to see her, she showed more annoyed face and tassked at me. I consider “tassking” a very rude thing to do especially in this kind of customer service environment. Ok, that’s another story for another time. Back to the main topic.

This time round, she was not even in the office and I planned not to wait but to see whoever for my matter. I walked in the first opened door and let myself be seated while wait for the person to finish with the call. Lucky enough, I wasn’t chased out but he kindly asked me for my business and quickly helped me with it. I happen to see his business cards and found out that he’s a branch manager sales. I quickly asked him where the customer complaint section is and how to go about making a formal complaint. He was a bit surprised by my sudden request and asked if I want to complain about him. I told him it’s not about him but about my unresolved account issue of two months and briefly explain the implications. He then gave me a contact detail to lodge the complaint in writing plus his business card. I thanked him and left planning to write a formal complaint to mentioned address if my problem was not resolved by EOB.

At 4:28pm, “Ebusfj” emailed to inform the account updates.

Hello May,
We have reversed the $5.00 fee and credited the interest for September, 2009.
Kind regards
XX

I checked my account again and confirmed that all has been corrected. I made another deposit for this month and replied her mail:

Thank you XX.
I was going to call you around 4:30 if the issue hasn’t been fixed. I guess I don’t need to anymore.
I just checked the account and glad to found out that I’ve received the interest and reversed $5.
I’ll do a deposit for this month and hopefully no such implications should arise for next month.
Thanks again for your help.
May

Case closed. The point of this long story was to note down how ANZ do their business and handle their customers’ issues.

I learnt that I should never trust their word and keeps following up on them till the end. I also wonder that how many of ANZ customers have encountered this kind of implications and never get to go about resolving them. Many might not even realize that some unreasonable fees or charges has been applied to their account without their notice and those of who noticed (such as my brother) have never care enough to make a complaint thinking it’s just a few bucks which needs not worth wasting his time upon. But I was stubborn enough to care for merry $10 and have managed to keep/save our monthly interest of $129.45 + regained $5 the unnecessary withdrawal fee. Now it’s not “just a merry figure” anymore isn’t it?

Finally, let me share those of you out there like me who did not know where to make a formal complaint, you can write a letter to the following address.

To: Lilian Alfereti
ANZ Customer Advocate,
7th Floor, ANZ House,
Suva.

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I prefer to intimate with #4 and #6 and less intimate with #7, #3, #2 and #5. Haven’t had a chance with #9.

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• online shopping (general, hosting, domain, etc),
• online membership/subscriptions fees (World of Warcraft subscriptions, etc),
• online visa application fees (not necessarily a travel visa),
• online education fees (MS Certs/Distance education)
• and many other expenses

And why do we have to send the bank statements and stuffs – “for our confirmation that card has been used in line with the new guidelines”. What a bother!

I don’t understand what’s going on with Fiji economy and foreign exchange policies. I don’t study economics, I don’t care about it; what I don’t care, I don’t want to know. But what I do know is that I want to use my own money in any way I like and I want no restrictions placed upon it.

The main reason I got myself a Credit card was to use it overseas related expenses and online payments. I don’t need a Credit card for any of the local transactions. I’m really unhappy about this new rules; first they rob us of 20% of our wealth (via devaluation) then they want to say I can’t buy stuffs with my own money. Ridiculous!

Dear Customer

Use of Personal and Business Credit Cards Overseas

We advise that the Reserve Bank of Fiji (RBF) has recently reviewed its exchange control guidelines in respect to the operations of Credit Cards when used overseas and has made the following changes with immediate effect:

• The Credit cards are to be used only for travel related expenditures which include reasonable expense for shopping etc, and to pay for small amounts of miscellaneous imports;
• A cash drawing/cash advance limit while overseas has been set at FJD1,500 per month;
• Credit card payments via Internet or Phone banking are limited to only $5,000 per month. You are required to forward a copy of the Bank statement to Customer Relations, 7th Floor, ANZ House for our confirmation that card has been used in line with the new guidelines;
• Business Credit Cards – are exempted from restriction on usage, however, RBF’s prior approval is required for any payment in excess of $5,000 for a purpose other than ‘travel’ related;

The monthly repayment limit delegated to commercial banks remains at $5,000 per month for overseas transactions for personal credit cards and a new limit has been set at $20,000 per card holder for Business Credit cards. Any payment above these limits must be referred to RBF for approval. To this end, customers are required to submit the original bank statement fo the cards account to RBF and seek their approval before payment can be effected by the commercial bank. Please note you would have to get this approval as RBF may seek clarification on overseas transactions.

In the event you breach any of these new guidelines, you would be reported to RBF. This could possibly lead to the cancellation of your credit card facility. Please call Contact Centre on phone 132411 should you require any clarification in respect to these advices.

Yours faithfully
Haroon Ali
Head of Retail Banking

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I was thinking of taking a leave just to lazy around on my birthday but then I’m expecting some emails from customers and came to work anyways. See how responsible me is.

I got a few birthday wish emails from friends and a friend asking for cake. Come to think of it, I hardly have cakes for my birthdays, am sure I only have less than 10 birthday cakes to-date. The main reason is, I’m not fond of cakes and I tend to ask for other food (Burmese food like Kyar San Chat, Ohn Noe Khout Swal etc) than cakes. Anyways, mom cooks my favourite prawns today and I’ll ask her to cook something yummy for dinner as well.

It’s a bit of noisy day at work but same old routine so not much to talk about. A friend share his good news of receiving two job offers today and heard my boss’s happy about getting some $$ or something. It’s always good to see happy people; in my attempt to join their happiness, I checked my account and found out that I’m FJD 1.51/2 richer today. hehe. You see, I recently opened my new very first saving account (joint with bro) and that’s the interest I got for the month (rather 10days). Hey it’s better than nothing rite?

Surprisingly, I don’t wish or reminisce over things at all this birthday. I’m not quite sure it’s because I’m either content with my life or don’t care a thing about it at all. I’m just treating like just another day; guess age is catching up.

Anyways, got to get back to work; I’m just dropping a few lines on my long ignored blog in memory of my birthday. So do wish my boring life healthy, wealthy and sane.

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As planned, I woke up at 4:30am, got myself ready and revised my training manual while I was waiting for the pickup. They (an Indian driver and a Fijian gal) got to my place at 5:15am and stopped at service station for coffee and hot bread before we left Suva around 5:30am.

It was a cold and drizzling morning with a pitch black sky and not a single soul on the road until we pass Lami. We had a small chat on the road and found out that the driver is very fluent in Fijian. He conversed with the girl in Fijian nonstop to keep himself awake or just being his talkative nature.

They laughed their heads off several times in their conversations and checked back at me a few times to see how I was doing. Myself being a quiet nature, I didn’t/couldn’t join in their conversation and just dozed off at the back.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t doze for long as I had to catch my breath on these lumps on the road where the car just practically flew over them. I noticed then that the driver was driving with a scary speed of 160km/hr and would not slow down near the turns or on the road block lumps.

I hurried to belt myself up but I couldn’t pull out the seat belt as it stuck to the wall and wouldn’t budge an inch. I started getting sick in the stomach on every jump and kept checking the car speed meter. It reached over 175km/hr almost right to 180km/hr mark.

Amazingly both the girl and the driver did not seem to care about how fast they were driving and enjoying their conversation. I normally get motion sickness after 1 or 1.5hr of normal driving. This time, it was not even 1hr yet and I started throwing up at the back. As usual, I prepared myself with tissue paper, plastic bags and a water bottle so I did not mess up the car. I rolled down the window and tried to get myself fresh air but the wind was too strong and I couldn’t keep it open for long. I didn’t make a sound on my first two throw ups so they didn’t notice me and I didn’t want to let them know either. Then a few turns before Singatoka, I couldn’t bear anymore and made a big puking sound and kept throwing up all the water I drunk after the first two pukes.

They then shocked to discover that I was very sick and made a stop near Singatoka temple. It was around 6:40am and a few shop already opened so we stopped for about 10min and continued to Nadi. I was a lot better after the stop and the driver did slow down his speed and drove around 125-140km/hr.

I noted that it was the fastest drive I’ve ever ridden in my life and the shortest time taken to reach Nadi. If I guessed it right, we took just 2.25 or 2.5hr to reach Nadi which normally takes around 3.5 to 4hrs. The driver mentioned that his normal record from Suva to Nadi is 2hr 20min and he can drive faster than that if the road is clear. I’m so used to my Dad’s driving of 60km/hr that I dislike speedy driving. I decided I refuse to ride his car ever again after that day.

As we get closer to Nadi, the weather is getting hot and the sun started glaring. We reached to Nadi around 7:30, picked up one of their staffs at his place and got to Namaka around 8am. We setup all the machines in the lab with the software and ready to start the training at 8am. They introduced me to their big boss (said he’s the new director) and he thanked me for the good work done with the project. We then started off the day with a somewhat long prayer. The director then made a short (15min) speech on this year theme, what they plan to achieve, how this system will help them etc. and left for his other appointments. Then I started with my training; there were only 8 participants in this session out of 14 from the previous one. There was one new face in the group and the rest attended the previous session so they all have the manual and CD with them except the new one. I’ve prepared a few extra manual print outs so it wasn’t a problem and commenced the training smoothly.

The TPAF trainers were very busy that day and every now and then, they went out of the room to attend their classes and pop back in after a few minutes. I find it annoying that people moving around while I’m talking but couldn’t do anything as they have their business to do. I tried to cover all sections in the manual and went through individually with late comers or those moving in and outs. We previously planned to have a whole day training in which I planned to go through both version of the system but they couldn’t spare the lab for the evening and I can only cover the administrator version of system. We finished around 1:30pm and waited for our pick up. One of the TPAF staffs showed me around their Namaka centre and we went in to one of the classroom commenced by one of the participants in my training. She introduced me to her students; they were roasting boneless chicken and baking some buns. It smelled really nice and I was so hungry as it’s passed lunch time. I guess she noticed me hungrily staring at the chicken so she offered some to taste but unfortunately the chicken wasn’t cooked enough yet and she asked the student to put it back in the oven for a few min again. While we were waiting for the chicken and continuing with their cooking session, my pick up arrived. I couldn’t wait for the chicken so just took a few buns, said thanks to the students and left the Namaka centre around 2:30pm.

They then took me to their office at Nadi Airport to pick up something. My dad called to ask how things were and told me to try out lunch at Ta Ta’s place. I asked the place to the driver but he wasn’t sure where so we drove around Nadi town and asked some policemen for direction. We found the place and had our lunch around 3:15pm.

We left Nadi around 3:30pm; we were supposed to come back together with their boss but we left the boss group and took off early to Singatoka for vegetable shopping. I bought a few heaps of oranges, cabbage and papaya. There were lots of good looking dalo bundles and some of them were purple. I remember mom loves purple dalo and asked the girl if that’s the right dalo but turned out they were not. The vendors told us to look for some on the way to Suva as they don’t plant purple type in Singatoka. We drove slowly and stops many times to wait for the group behind us. The driver got out and smoked on every stop and he told us that he love smoking and drinking grog. We quickly strolled into Outriggers for a loo and waited the other group outside.

Finally the other group caught up and took a lead in front of us. Their driver was driving with 120km/hr flat and our driver cannot over take him as the boss was in that car. So he followed behind disgruntled and making faces and fits at the driver in front via the mirror. As we get closer to Suva, the car in front slows down to 80-100km/hr and no more over taking at all as the cars from Suva coming nonstop from the opposite lane. It was raining and with a slow drive, I didn’t puke at all on the way home. We then saw some guys selling dalo at the road side and the girl asked for purple dalo. Luckily they got one last purple bundle and I happily bought it.

I got home around 7:35; the driver repeated his name 3 times and told me to call him if I ever need to drive to Nadi as he drives private taxi in his free times. I thanked him and the girl for the day and forgotten their names after 5min. I was so tired and sat around for an hour reporting back the day events to the family; had shower, dinner, check emails, wrote down a few lines for the post and slept. And finish up the post after a week.

The End.

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Great! Now I can move on to other matters and try to get back to blogging which I’ve been ignoring for so long. Got to update all those old plugins with new versions and got to clean up the spams on my blog. I forgot when was the last day I login to my blog to clean up spam.

Oh Yes!, I have a lot of Animes to catch up too. I’m following this 3 new animes. I got about 4 episodes each and I think I like 07-Ghost for good actions and Hanasakeru Seishounen for cute character profiles. I’m just downloading Tears to Tiara for the sake of utilizing my bandwidth but it seems to be pretty fun to watch and hell lotta blood for an anime. The blood and slashing are like those in 300 movie. Ok may be not.

Other day, I had a short conversation with a Japanese friend and when I mentioned I’m crazy about animes and manga, he told me to check out some of his manga. May be I’ll go borrow some manga from him later. I’ve never read a paper based hard copy manga yet as I’m only reading online versions. I at least like to feel the touch of good old manga book. I’m currently reading Shinobi Life (read), My Babaric Girlfriend/Yours and My Secret and Skip Beat (read | watch)

Every now and then I enjoy checking out friends’ photos on facebook and accepting new friends invites. I’m not sure they even know me at all, cos’ I only know about 10 people on facebooks and the rest are new faces for me; yet it’s no harm accepting/making new friends and I enjoy checking out their lovely photos. It calms me down during my busy days to see happy faces which kind of make my day enjoyable.

I haven’t been reading any of my feeds except 2 or 3 daily updates and I’m also ignoring tweets for a while now. Surely I’m behind on a lot of things so gonna catch up soon. I notice my Fiji friends are also not updating much on their blogs. Heard Zatlite is too lazy to blog but I think he tweets regularly. A friend at Lunch in Suva is making some $ for retirement plan while over investing on lunch menus. I’m not sure Sarnil is updating his blog or just his feed acting up cos’ I got all his old posts show up as new on my reader. The failed paradise guys are also very quiet these days. I always love the photos of A letter home from Meg C. I think Digital Fiji switches from blogging to twittering as I see a lot more tweets than posts. Ofcos’ the only blog with regular updates would be Ocenic and the posts are always very informative. I ignored all news blogs as I’m sure there is never been a good news to read lately.

There are 1000+ new posts on my Myanmar Blogs folder and I don’t even want to open any of the folders with 1000+ new updates; may be I’ll go through them slowly later. But I saw a lot of good work done by Ko Soe Min with the help of Ko NLS on their font and various projects. I’m amazed that he’s such a great programmer and thankful that he’s investing his precious time on such projects. I also hope that I can be like him one day and provide my knowledge for betterment of MM community. For now, I don’t have that much knowledge and time to apply to such projects so I can only concentrate on things that can put bread rice on the table. Like Zatlite once said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what’s for dinner“, or something like that, I forgot the exact phrase he used.

Just now I reassured my uselessness and reconfirmed that I AM A BAD DAUGHTER, after a short lunch time talk with a colleague. Everyday mum made a Bento in the morning for us and at lunch time when my colleague asks what’s for lunch, I don’t have an answer for it unless I open my lunch box and check for it first. As usual, today I didn’t know what my mom packed for lunch so couldn’t answer my colleague. He noted that I never help with cooking and I sleep while mom wakes up early to cook for Bento. He commented that I must have a pretty good life and indeed I have a very worry free life and am a very bad daughter as I hardly help with house work or cooking.

I do really appreciate my mom hard works and thinking of treating her some good lunch this weekend to celebrate Mothers’ day. I have this craving for Daikuku’s Special BBQ stake meal which is $45 per serve and a dish of Sashimi. I think I’ll have to order about 3 stake serves to fulfil my bottomless pit enjoy with my mom.

Alright, that’s all for now on my unrelated thoughts and a quick blog update. Hope you all have a good week.

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Celebrating 25 years
For 25 years, Microsoft Press books have focused on helping you take your skills and knowledge to the next level. Celebrate our 25th Anniversary with a “Free e-book of the Month” offer! Simply sign up for the Microsoft Press Book Connection Newsletter for notification of offers, register, and download the selection of the month.

Whatever the event, it’s free books yay!!

Microsoft® Visual C#® 2008 Express Edition: Build a Program Now!
By Patrice Pelland
ISBN: 9780735625426

In this lively, eye-opening, hands-on book, all you need is a computer and the desire to learn how to program with Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition.

Windows Vista Resource Kit, Second Edition
By Mitch Tulloch, Tony Northrup, and Jerry Honeycutt with the Windows Vista Team
ISBN: 9780735625969

In-depth, comprehensive, and fully updated for Service Pack 1, this Resource Kit delivers the information you need to administer Windows Vista.

Via: Microsoft Press

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The three songs she sent are:

• Ma Nyar Taw Buu Min Ko Chit Thi by N. Khine Yar
• Tate Tate Lay Pal Chit Twar Mal by L Sai Zee
• Way Ya Mhar Kyout Thu by Joe Jar

Out of them, I love the first one, “Ma Nyar Taw Buu Min Ko Chit Thi”, the most. Icy sang very well in that song and matches her voice perfectly. The other two are great too but I have a hard time catching up the words in the last song, “Way Ya Mhar Kyout Thu”, that I couldn’t get a short lyric out of it.

Icy sent me 3 versions of each song. I like the first version the best where she sang with all her feelings and sweet, emotional voice. The problem was, the recording was bad, we cannot hear her voice well and the music over powering her voice. So I asked her for 2nd recording and she improved it by adding some echo effect in them. They seem fine but I just don’t like echo effect and prefer her clear voice so asked for another try. The last try was excellent especially in “Ma Nyar Taw Buu Min Ko Chit Thi” song. Her voice and music match very well and the volume was alright too. So I accepted that version and was given the permission to post about it here so I can share with the rest of Icy’s fans.

Ma Nyar Taw Buu Min Ko Chit Thi: [ MP3 - Final ] [ 1st Try ]

အရွိကို အရွိတိုင္းသာ ဖြင့္ေျပာမည္၊
ျမင္ျမင္ျခင္း မင္းကုိခ်စ္သြားျပီး၊
ပိုင္ဆိုင္တဲ့ အသဲကို အရွံဳးေပးခဲ့ရ၊
ဒါအခ်စ္ပဲလား စိတ္မွာေမာသည္။

နားလည္မွဳ တံခါးေတြဖြင့္ထားျပီ၊
အၾကင္နာစကားေလးေတြ မ်က္ဝန္းစီ၊
ပိုင္ရွင္မဲ့ အခ်စ္ကိုေပးအပ္ခဲ့ျပီ၊
မညာေတာ့ဘူး မင္းကိုခ်စ္သည္။

ခ်စ္သူေလးရွိရာ ဟိုအေဝးစီ၊
လာရာလမ္းေလးကို ေမွ်ာ္တတ္ျပီ၊
ပိုင္ဆိုင္ဖို႔ဘဝကို ေပးအပ္ခဲ့ျပီး၊
မညာေတာ့ဘူး မင္းကိုခ်စ္သည္။

Tate Tate Lay Pal Chit Twar Mal: [ MP3 - Final ] [ 1st Try ]

တိတ္တိတ္ေလးပဲ ခ်စ္သြားမယ္
မျမင္ေအာင္ ဖုန္းကာဝွက္ကာရယ္
အၾကင္နာ ဖုန္းဖိထားပါတယ္၊
ရင္ဆိုင္မင္းမ်က္ဝန္းရဲ့ အၾကည့္ေတြကိုနားလည္တယ္။

အျပင္မွာ အသိလိုပဲေနတယ္၊
ရင္မွာရွိတာမင္းပါကြယ္/ေနေတာ့လဲကြယ္၊
အစဥ္သာေပးဆပ္ရင္းနဲ႔ ေနာက္ကြယ္၊
တိတ္တိတ္ေလးပဲ ခ်စ္သြားမယ္။

Way Ya Mhar Kyout Thu: [ MP3 - Final ] [ 1st Try ]

Although I like the final versions, I still think that she’s done better in her very first recordings in terms of adding more life to the lyrics and think that her voice was more attractive in those; so here I am adding the 1st tries as well. I feel she got a little tired in “Tate Tate Lay Pal Chit Twar Mal” and “Way Ya Mhar Kyout Thu” final recordings as she must have been practising a few times and her voice must have started to give up on her; yet she has done them excellently.

Do listen to them, I guarantee that she’s way better than average newbies and has a great potential to be one of the professionals. I’m sure you’ll enjoy these three songs from Icy7ven; comments are most welcome.

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Last weekend while I was changing Zatlite’s blog template, I thought of adding a contact page for him. Blogger/blogspot blogs don’t allow editing server side scripts so you can’t really add an email contact form and such but ofcos there’s always many tricks to go about. Some bloggers use Kontactr or Zoho contact form scripts. They require a registration to their site and have to put up a power by logo on your form. I’m too lazy to register so never really tried those out but chose an easier way to add a contact form on blogger using my favorite Google Forms.

Google Forms are just so easy to create and everything can be done in your google account. Here are brief steps to add a Google form as blogger contact form.

• Go to http://docs.google.com,
• Click New > Form (or) From Template option,
• Enter form title and brief description, then add your form fields; make some required fields.
• Under “See responses” button, you can check form “Summary” or “Spreadsheet” where the submitted data is stored.
• You can grab the embedded code under “More actions” > “Embed” option or add a proper form submit confirmation message by clicking “Edit Confirmation” option.
• Live form can be viewed by clicking the link at the bottom of the page. That’s the link you send to your friends too.
• Create a new post, eg. “Contact me”, on your blog; choose HTML view, paste the embedded code in; publish your post.
• If you want to move your contact post from the first page, just change the publish date to earlier dates and the post will be hidden then you can link it from your menu

Once you’ve created your form, you need to know when the user submit to your form as soon as the submission is done. To do that, go to the related “Spreadsheet” by clicking “See responses” > “Spreadsheet” option from the Edit Form page or go directly from your google documents page. Click on “Share” blue button dropdownlist, click “Set notification rules” option. Set the rules as required and you are all set.

Ofcos’ the bad side of having Google form is that, you can’t style the text-boxes, the width are all the same. Well…maybe you can if you read through documentation or something but I’m too lazy to do that so may be some other time. And also it does not protect your form from spammers. There’s no CAPTCHA or nothing; hence only good to use it on small/starter blogs. Zatlite blog doesn’t have many visitors/hits yet so he won’t get much spams; and I don’t really care if he gets spams either. I’ve done my work of adding contact form, the rest is up to him. If you want those contact forms with CAPTCHA then try those two mentioned above.

A few more idea to make good use of Google Form is that, having a post suggestion form on your side bar or a small site survey form etc. Here is a small suggestion for Myanmar Blogs Directory blogs to make use of Google Form. Instead of letting people leave their blog links for submission in the comment form, it’s good to have a proper form to collect the blog information such, “Blog Name”, “Category”, “Blogger Name”, “Brief Description” etc. Create a nice form and embed the code in the side bar or in a new post and start collecting new blogs information in a neat excel sheet which can later easily exported into a proper database if they plan to create a searchable directory. Oh well, just my worthless 2cents.

There you have it, give it a try won’t you?. And do share your ideas/how you use google docs too.

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This guide will teach you about the benefits of the latest virtualization technologies and how to plan, implement, and manage virtual infrastructure solutions. The technologies covered include: Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2009, Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5, Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization, and Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

Download the first chapter or sign up to download entire e-book. (PDF, 14.4MB)

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What is Lucene.Net?

[ # ] Lucene.Net is a source code, class-per-class, API-per-API and algorithmatic port of the Java Lucene search engine to the C# and .NET platform utilizing Microsoft .NET Framework.

Lucene.Net sticks to the APIs and classes used in the original Java implementation of Lucene. The API names as well as class names are preserved with the intention of giving Lucene.Net the look and feel of the C# language and the .NET Framework. For example, the method Hits.length() in the Java implementation now reads Hits.Length() in the C# port.

In addition to the APIs and classes port to C#, the algorithm of Java Lucene is ported to C# Lucene. This means an index created with Java Lucene is back-and-forth compatible with the C# Lucene; both at reading, writing and updating. In fact a Lucene index can be concurrently searched and updated using Java Lucene and C# Lucene processes.

What happens to Lucene.NET library?

This has no effect on Lucene.NET project incubated at Apache (http://incubator.apache.org/lucene.net/) as dotlucene.net was an independent site promoting DotLucene/Lucene.NET.

Where do I find more about Lucene.NET?

• Official website: http://incubator.apache.org/lucene.net/
• Downloads: http://incubator.apache.org/lucene.net/download/
• API documentation: http://incubator.apache.org/lucene.net/docs/ (1.4.3, 1.9.1, 2.0, 2.1)
• Apache Lucene – Java code: http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/
• Cross-Platform Implementations: http://wiki.apache.org/lucene-java/LuceneImplementation
• Sites that use Lucene/Powered By: http://wiki.apache.org/lucene-java/PoweredBy

Is dotlucene.net content available?

The devoted dotlucene.net fans can download www.dotlucene.net content as a zip archive: www.dotlucene.net.zip (476 kB). DotLucene API Search demo 1.1 (2.38 MB)

Lucene.Net Architecture [ # ]

The lower layer is the data access layer (Storage). Then, the upper layer is about accessing the index files (data access). This layer is used by the indexing system and the searching system. On top of those we find a layer for searching and a search request parser layer used by the searching part of Lucene.Net. Identically we found a parser layer and a document layer used for the indexation part of Lucene.Net.

[ # ] At the heart of the engine is the index (similar to a database table) with fields (like database columns) that contains documents (like database rows). To search one must write a query and give it to the engine to finding matching documents. The query language for a database is SQL and for Lucene it’s a query object (you can construct complex queries by composing an object graph of query instances).

Search engines are super fast for finding text because documents are stored in an inverted index (where the terms of each field is tokenized, hashed and sorted at index time).

In contrast to database queries, search engines can calculate relevance scores when searching. This is because they use a better querying model called the vector space model instead of the classical boolean model. In the vector model, documents and queries are represented as vectors. The similarity between a query and any document can be calculated with simple vector operations. Documents with a higher similarity will appear higher in the results. Conversely, databases only know if rows meets the where criteria or not and cannot compute a relevance score – this true/false classification is how the boolean model got it’s name.

Resources/Reference links

• Introducing Lucene.Net
• Lucene, an introduction
• DotLucene: Full-Text Search for Your Intranet or Website using 37 Lines of Code
• Working with Lucene.Net
• Lucene.Net – Text Analysis
• Indexing and searching business entities using Lucene.Net Framework, part 1
• Indexing and searching business entities using Lucene.Net Framework, part 2
• Indexing and searching business entities using Lucene.Net Framework, part 3
• C# and Lucene to index and search (used VS 2005 and C#)
• Indexing Database Content with dotLucene
• Indexing and Searching Image files (Using Lucene.NET along with open-source libraries)
• Full Text Search with Hibernate Search
• Luke – Lucene Index Toolbox
• LuSql is a simple but powerful tool for building Lucene indexes from relational databases. It is a command-line Java application for the construction of a Lucene index from an arbitrary SQL query of a JDBC-accessible SQL database.
• Tutorial: implementing lucene.NET search
• cs2project
• Lucene in Action book, First and Second Edition
• Lucene Intro and QueryParser Rules by Erik Hatcher (Java version)
• Introducing Lucene.Net: A plunge intro creating a fast, full text index, with advanced searching capabilities.
• LINQ to Lucene: Providing a custom LINQ solution for the Lucene Information Retrieval System, commonly referred to as a search-engine.
  • LINQ & Lambda, Part 4: Lucene.Net.
• NHibernate.Search using Lucene.NET Full Text Index by Simon Green
  • Part 1: How to use Lucene.NET with NHibernate to provide full-text searching.
  • Part 2: Performing Google-like searches of NHibernate-persisted objects using Lucene.NET search engine.
  • Part 3: Using Lucene.NET to find similar items for ‘posts like this’ or ‘related pages’.
• C# and Lucene to index and search: This sample will show you how to use Lucene from your .NET application to index and search content.
• Fun with Lucene.Net for BlogEngine.Net by Jared

Lucene.Net Cross-Platform Implementations: LuceneImplementations

Lucene implementations in languages other than Java:

• CLucene – Lucene implementation in C++
• Lucene.Net – Lucene implementation in .NET
• Lucene4c – Lucene implementation in C
• LuceneKit – Lucene implementation in Objective-C (Cocoa/GNUstep support)
• Lupy – Lucene implementation in Python (RETIRED)
• NLucene – another Lucene implementation in .NET (out of date)
• Zend Search – Lucene implementation in the Zend Framework for PHP 5
• Plucene – Lucene implementation in Perl
• KinoSearch – a new Lucene implementation in Perl
• PyLucene – GCJ-compiled version of Java Lucene integrated with Python
• MUTIS – Lucene implementation in Delphi
• Ferret – Lucene implementation in Ruby

Other Search/Indexing Services

• Searcharoo 4: C# search engine: refactored to search Word, PDF and more
• Searcharoo.Net: http://www.searcharoo.net/
• CastleProject
• C# Parser

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