As you can see, our traffic has dropped since Oct 2008, while I start my network cabling project which took away most of our time and caused us lack of taking care on our baby blog, the results was as above. In this month, it has an increase of about 30%. Let me tell you the reasons that make it happened.

Reason #0: Time Factor.
Time is the root factor of the reasons below. If I were as busy as last October, the following reasons won’t happen.

Reason #1a: We have joined Nuffnang & [thanks to innit].
Actually I signed up both Nufnang and its competitor on the same day at the same time, but later I found that its competitor show white screen on the ads area, which didn’t match our theme and make our blog ugly. I let it on for few hours and remove it. Few days later, I got the Glitterati status on Nuffnang which enable me to share this blog with more readers using innit. From that day on, ColinJong.com’s traffic has start recovered from its lowered peak by attrating extra numbers of local readers.

Reason #1b: More interaction with other blogger.
With innit, I have jumped out of the box and found more other blogs that are match my tastes. The traffic has increase because I view other’s blog and others view mine as well. This happen naturally but not purposely. I only read other blog that I am interested, and I swear that I read before I nang except sometime it nang automatically. Leaving comment on other’s blog also atrract some traffic to ColinJong.com. I did it not for attracting traffic, but I would like to exchanging ideas with others. Attracting traffic has been done unintentionally.

Reason #2: Fixed Feed problem.
Feedburner didn’t not pickup my latest posts, and I didn’t know until months later. The worst thing was I redirected all feed (rss/atom from my domain) to feedburner. It caused some readers or even web crawlers thought that I did not update my blog for ages and leaving colinjong.com. I had transfer feedbuner account as requested, and used the Resync feature to clear the old cache store at feedburner and it automatically retrieve my latest post. It has been working properly until now. I did it in January and the traffic from Google Blog Search increased because it indexes blogs by site feeds

Reason #3: More posts/sharings = More Traffic & [thanks to search engine].
We share more things, and it automatically attract more visitors in this month. Of course, we also make sure the quality is acceptable, and not blindly post anything. Both Quality and Quantity are important to us and our readers. We wish to obtain ISO :p

Few more minutes to go, Feb 2009 will be gone. I hope that my traffic will keep increasing.

Happy belated birthday to Nuffnang !!!

This door lock is not as secure as I imagined.

Months ago, when I was doing my project on network cable, I was waiting for the person-in-charge who was supposed to open a door for me to do the network point termination. His office was just a few doors away, but after he opened the door for me, he locked himself outside his office.

He looked frustrated and was seeking for help. He asked me if I have any tools to open the door for him, but what I had was only screw driver and it didn’t help.

Lukily his colleague came and did the lock picking. He said he will try his best.

He got an old useless phone card and insert it into the narrow space between the door and the wall. He moved it left and right, up and down. It was not easy but not too difficult as well. Within 10 minutes, the door was opened.

The design of this door is good because it can automatically lock the door, but if it is not installed properly and some space is allowed between the lock and the wall, the phone card can be inserted to push the triangular part to move inwards and the door will be opened.

The phone card is useless after the lock picking process.

Disclaimer: This post is not to teach its reader to do lock picking, but to remind you to be careful if you have this type of door lock.

Another Reminder: This lock can easily lock you outside, remember to take your keys with you when you are going out of this type of door.

This is the work done by the cat that we called “stranger” previously. This cat is not a stranger cat to us anymore but getting very close with us. He is getting naughtier, and has been trained by me :p to jump from one place to another place, even above the car roof top. The bad thing is that he is not only sleeping on top of my car but also sleeping on top of my neighbour’s car. Luckily my neighbour did not complaint about it.

I am not sure about the wall on my neighbour side but our wall is full of his foot print. This cat really likes to climb to any high places. From the cat’s point of view, I believe he has widen his vision scope than any other cats.

Well you may ask how did I train him. First, you must know what is the thing that attract him the most. Yes, food is the answer. When we feed our two “home cats”, he also wants some, and meows very loudly. This is the time I train him. I put some food in the container on the floor, and he finished it, then I put on a higher shoe rack and shake the container to make some noise, he always responses to the noise and moving forward to the food. Slowly, I trained him to jump to the top of my car by putting his food container on top of my car. Finally, the highest skill level is … …, he jump from my car to my father’s car or my brother’s car. Since I trained him, he likes to sleep on top of my car and now on others cars. :p

He is very aggresive to other cats that come to our house except our two “home cats”. He will hiss and prepare to fight if any cats enter his territory. My mission now is to train him to accept other cats, and can share the food peacefully with other cats. Is that possible?

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New staffs in an Organization (Stories of HR and Team Leader)

What will happen to a new staff who just join an organization? Will the older staff act like this cat? It depends.

I have encountered something during my first job, on my forth day in that company, the HR asked me to go to her office to have a chat. She asked me if there was anybody telling me something bad about the company. I said no, and she warned me that someone (but didn’t tell me who was it) in the company was trying to say bad thing about the company to make new staffs quit. Hmm…… human use different strategy. But what I can sense is the staffs that didn’t like the company instead of the new staffs. But at that time I believe what the HR told me.

I also remember another things, my superior gave me a self-evaluation form and asked me to evaluate myself before she evaluate my performance. There was one part in the form about the knowledge of Linux OS, when she discussed with me about the grade that I gave myself, she said that she will lower the grade because first reason, our GM is very good in that subject and my knowledge was not to that level, secondly we would have a lot of work to do if GM considered that our department have good man power on Linux OS to do R&D. What do you think about this case? I think she has done something to protect me from getting a lot of pressure from the GM, and not to prevent me from getting increment, because later I was promoted to assistant team leader. Unfortunately, there was a person who served the company longer and had more experience than anyone of us in our team, but she was not promoted… … politic issues.

Finally I resigned, and only left some footprint in the company because the HR jump to another company and she pulled me over. Have I done the wrong thing? “Jump ship” is nothing wrong if it only affect personal benefits, but if it involves public feeling… … (I don’t want talk about politics, I want peace and harmony, not betrayed). Sometimes a new company environment may not be as good as the previous company, sometimes it is our own personal issue that make us feel the company is good or bad, this is not a good way to tell a company is good or bad.

I hope our “stranger” cat will not leave us by leaving only footprints on the wall and jump ship to other houses. Haha…

Locally it is called “Bu4Bu4Gao1Sheng1” in Mandirin, which means “rising above step by step”. As you know, people from other places may call it differently. I am not sure about its scientific name. No matter what is its name, as long as it is a good name, the seller will make the name popular within his territory.

I like to see new shoots on plants, it means new lifes, new hopes and new opportunities. They are usually soft and need to be handled gently. They always present fresh colours such as yellow, light green or even red. For BuBuGaoSheng, it shows light green before each of the leaf in the new shoot show their faces to the world. Soon, the shoot will expand and each of the leaves will open up themselves, and have equal opportunities to obtain the air and the lights.

If this plant is being taken care properly, the new shoot is usually taller then the older tallest branches. But I think this is not the case for picture #2, and #3, because I planted them for a vihara one year ago, but I did not take proper care of them, and now some of them have turned yellow.

Since last october, I have less time to take care of the plants in my garden. I have to thank my parents to help me water them. Otherwise I can’t imagine the “death of plants” that happen in my garden. When I look at the new shoot (picture #1 above), I think I should put more effort to “repair” my garden now.

Picture #2, and #3 were taken one year ago. I am not going to show you their latest look because they are not healthy now. I will show you how they look after I feed them with enough fetilizer.

Today is Tuesday. We should put fetilizer to our work also (put more efforts). If you like your work, I believe you won’t count how many days more the weekends are coming. I keep telling myself, work harder, be more productive, and accomplish more goals.

Siew Peng has practiced her photography skill again. She has captured the details of the flowers in macro mode. Nowadays with the close-up mode built-in on the camera, it not too difficult to take close-up photos, as long as your hands were not shaking. Then, what is so special about these photos? The colour of the flowers has caught my attention. It gives a warm feeling and we wish to share with you too.

Let’s imagine, when you wake up in the morning, you go to a beautiful garden, with trees, grass and the must-have nice smell beautiful flowers, you can listen to the awakening birdsong while you are rubbing your sleepy eyes and you can breath in the cold and fresh air. You raise your head a bit looking into the sky, you can see the beautiful sunrise which makes the whole garden turns into the colour of golden-orange. The little heat emitted from the sun perfectly neutralises the cold air, and you can feel that you are hugged by the Mother Nature. Yes, this is the feeling that the first picture has given me where cold and warm exist together and give a harmony feeling.

Today is the first working day of the week; we wish you have a peaceful and harmony week ahead.

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About this hibiscus

This hibiscus plant is planted by my father. It is the Hawaiian hybrid hibiscus. The flower has light orange colour at the outer part of the petals, and dark orange and pink colour toward the middle. The diameter of the flower is more than 10 cm. We have other species of hibiscus and we will show you next time.

Its scientific name is called Hibiscus rosa-sinensi. In Mandirin we called it Da4Hong2Hua1 (which means big red flower). In Malay it is called bunga raya (which means grand flower). There are many species with different colours, the red colour hibiscus is the national flower of our country – Malaysia. Red colour represents courage and the five petals represent the Five Principles of Nationhood of Malaysia.