I am sure by now everyone who has participated in the $2500 link baiting contest would know that it was all a scam. When I first posted my entry on my blog, I too questioned if Ashwin would see it through.

I mean, $2500 is a lot of money and this guy even needs people to chip in to subsidize his website hosting. My own hosting was only $10 a year and it’s now even free and here’s this guy asking for donations and then saying that he would give away $2500. He has got to be kidding. I was even telling a friend that if he really has a winner, we won’t even know if the $2500 is in American Dollars or some other weak currency.

Anyway, Phil from Contest Blogger left me a comment and I believe, all who entered the contest, saying that Ashwin is full of crap. Well, I am a gambler and although I figured that he may be crapping, I still wanted to have an entry in, just in case. In reply to his comment, I said that time will tell. Nobody can escape from time and true enough, 20th August 2007 came around. I did not bother checking Ashwin’s site until a fellow blogger told me that Ashwin’s winner has a blog with a miserable blog post that is the entry to the contest and then followed by a copy & paste news report.

Ashwin may think that he is a genius in the game but this is such a stale trick. I feel sorry for people who had their hopes high thinking that they had a shot at $2500. To me, my entry was just another “interim” post and luckily I do not feel as if I was “cheated”.

Phil is giving away $100 to one blogger who has participated in the $2500 contest, if you would only edit the link to Ashwin’s post to Phil’s post. This is a smart idea but it’s GENUINE. So good luck to you all!

As you know, I serve Google Ads on my blogs and there’s this advertisement by Tales of Pirates (URL unknown because I don’t click on my own ads and am too lazy to Google it) that has been running on my blog for ages but only today did I notice something amiss.

Look at this screenshot carefully and do you see what is wrong? The word DOWNLOAD is spelt wrongly. Don’t they have a proofreader? Don’t they have friends who let them know upon seeing this ad? Won’t staff of Goooooogle Adsense let them know or don’t they check the ads that are served by their system?

It is said that the human brain can work out words as long as the first and last letters are in place while those in between could be jumbled and we could still understand the message perfectly. This is proof of the theory!

The other day, I was looking for chat rooms for my friend to while away time since she messaged me that she as bored. I found her a couple of chat rooms but I have no idea how interesting they were, she just have to find out for herself because I don’t have the time to chat 😀

Anyway, while I was searching, I came across a website with adult and teen chat rooms. This site is different from the chat rooms that I have chatted in. Well, I used to spend the whole day in chat rooms so I do know quite a bit about chat rooms. Those were the days!

Idol Me is a forum-style chat room and not real time chatting. Last time, I loved real time chatting because the reaction is instant and the atmosphere is very different especially when there are many people chatting at the same time and although these people have never met each other before in real life, they still felt a sense of camaraderie especially for regular chatters.

Now that I no longer have so much free time to chat, I prefer forum style chat rooms. This is because all the posts would still be there for me to catch up on whenever I log in. Also, I do not have to stick around the room if I wanted to ask a question. I could just post it on a chat room like Idol Me.

While Idol Me is primarily set up to chat about American Idol, there are also other interesting topics of discussions like politics, religion, television, sports and not forgetting JOKES. We need our daily dose of humor, don’t we?

Now that I browsed through the chat rooms, I recall visiting Idol Me before a few months ago when it was newly set up and I remember thinking that there is no section for Malaysian Idol. Boy, I am surprised that within a short time, there are so many members now on Idol Me chatting away! I think I’ll be visiting Idol Me more often now!

Just now as I was surfing the internet, I was surprised to come across a company that deals in mailing lists. This company has a huge database of email addresses where these people have opted in to a newsletter or Mailing List. I think this company is very smart in collecting these data and sorted them according to their interest and what they would like to be updated on. If messages are sent to people who are interested in a certain product, they would be more than happy to click on the link in the email.

Some people may think of these as spam though, but I believe that they are the ones who have forgotten about signing up with certain companies. I know it happened to me many times before.

Anyway, they must be doing something right that they are now the largest mailing list provider in America. They could even offer their clients customized lists so that a majority of the people on the list will willing convert into buyers. This in turn increases the sales of the clients.

If I were running a business, I too would opt for a customized mailing list because it will then safe me a lot of time on approaching the wrong people.

In the course of work, I have to send large files, chunks of them and always find it troublesome to break up my files and then teach my recipient how to join them up again. And sometimes they tell me there’s an error and I would have to resend. I just find it a total hassle but I did not have a solution for it until a friend recommended DriveWay.

I have tried it and I must say it is so user-friendly I wonder why no one thought of this before! Finally, I could upload and send my files up to 500MB seamlessly without a problem; there’s no download storage limit or download limit.

Typically email programs do not support such a file size and even if they say they do, if you have tried using it, you will notice that your file is “stuck” forever and would not go through.

Moreover, DriveWay has this feature which allows sharing of documents where we could access them easily OR edit them. With emailing, we would have to download the file to our computer, edit and resend but DriveWay just eliminated the redundancy and allows editing text documents right on their widget. Awesome 😀

Although I have known of Twitter for a long time, I did not see a need to register for an account. I see no point in letting the world know what I am doing up to the minute especially when nothing interesting ever happens to me anyway.

Today, I was playing with my phone when I discovered that now, Fring supports MSN and also Twitter. Well, I did not see that previously.

I am thinking now that perhaps I should get a Twitter account just so that I could make the full use of my programme, device and my 3G subscription.

I wonder if there’s anyone who would be interested in what I have to say in Twitter. I know that it will be something lame like “I am sleeping”, “I just woke up”, “I am in the toilet.” Bla bla bla

Or would I be polluting Twitter world?

I know I said that I would get my data on the computer backed-up but I keep procrastinating and then forgotten all about it until my friend asked me if I have found a good online backup service. OOPS!

He told me about IDrive-E’s encrypted Basic online backup that would certainly meet me requirements of FREE service, secure and 99.99% up time that comes with 2GB of storage space. That is awesome news and 2GB is more than enough to meet my needs!

According to my friend, if I do require more space, I could upgrade my account to an unlimited plan and it would only cost me $4.95 per month and subscribing for one year would only be $49.95, two months free!

My friend said that since I have so much junk data on my computer, I should back up early and frequent, especially those that keep changing through the day. He told me that I could run the back up program in the background while I would and IDrive-E would back up my frequently changing data at almost real time. This will save me the hassle of backing up at the end of the day, every day. Yay!