A couple of days ago, I received a Friendster Friend Request. It is weird because this is was from a rather prominent local blogger and while I do not know him personally, he is chums with one of my friends, also a very popular local blogger. I am sure my friend has never mentioned me to him before so I wondered why he suddenly could come across my Friendster profile and then send a friend request.

I have been a Friendster member for years at the request of a good friend but I never did anything to my profile and never seek anyone out to “add”. I can never understand why people can link up with total strangers and call them friends.

In this case we are now linked up and then what? I may have accepted his request but we never even exchanged a note.

The other day when I logged into my account, I saw a few people in my friends list and wondered, “Who the heck are they?” You see, I don’t even have more than twenty people in my list and I don’t even remember who they are!

The problem with me is that when acquaintances request an “add”, I will accept it but after a while of not keeping in touch, I would have forgotten about them totally. What makes it worse is that some do not use a universal online ID and their Friendster user name is not something that I recognise straightaway.

I think I am going to delete them from my list. When I don’t remember them, how can they be my friend??

If you read my other blog, you would know that I suffer from acne. I wouldn’t say that my condition is bad because I have seen people worse that mine but it does not help when society keeps letting me know of my bad skin condition wherever I go, in glossy magazines, etc.

I am fortunate that I am not to the point where the mirror is my enemy (yet) although I have days where I feel that I would look more beautiful IF only the acne are not around! To be frank, I have tried many possible solutions but none seems to work permanently. Perhaps I am not diligent; perhaps I am too cheap to try the more expensive products, hence better? That is the perception, anyway.

Some people will advice me that I should not eat chocolate or spicy food. Well, I think those are just old wives tales because I did abstain from them before but there was no improvement to my complexion.

As someone who is practically glued to her computer the whole day, of course I did my research on acne online and one of the best resource site that I came across is www.acne.com. I have found the tips here useful. One of the most effective methods for me is to apply a coat of Benzoyl Peroxide 2.5% cream ALL OVER MY FACE. Many people were shocked by that because usually people apply acne cream on the affected spots only but trust me, you can really see a huge difference.

There was once the pharmacy ran out of 2.5% so I bought one with 5% strength and ended up burning my skin. Hahaha! It was a lesson well learnt!

I recently registered with something called Job-O-Matic that I saw from Feedburner. They say that we could have another way to monetize our website or blog by creating a job board. That sounds great so I joined hehehe

However, after joining, I am not sure if as an independent and individual blog, I could get the sales or not. The good thing is that even if you are not able to find people who are willing to pay you to advertise on your job board, Job-O-Matic will automatically fill your board up with their ever ready database of jobs and you will still receive a cut of the commission.

The jobs that Job-O-Matic fills for you are based on your tags or keywords. I have tried it out on my own newly created job board and was happy to note that only relevant results were displayed. Luckily!

Although I have a job board, I think such a concept works best for sites like JobStreet. They can use such a board to cater to their overseas browsers. As for now, since my readership is not as impressive as I would like it to be, I am not going to put my job board live first.

Perhaps sometime in the near future when I have grown my readership further and spent time redesigning the Job Board, I will link up to it from my blog.

If you have tried Job-O-Matic with success, I would like to hear from you!

Last week while at work, I was given the thankless task of collecting data from a recent survey conducted by our company. I say thankless because nobody understands the amount of work that I have to put in after setting the survey forms, making sure they are filled in as accurately as possible and collecting the data and then analyzing and interpreting the data and putting them into pie charts and graphs. A lot of thought has to be put into each survey and we do that about twice a year (!), not forgetting the time, energy and sleepless nights.

I am always afraid of missing out an important item in the survey and then I am answerable to the boss. Believe me, the stress is no fun at all.

I sort of complained to my friend about it and he said my company is so back dated!! He told me that his company has been using a web based survey solution provided by iSalient for sometime now and the problem I faced, which he has also encountered is not a thing of the past.

According to my friend, iSalient offers a complete solution to surveys and analytical studies online. By using iSalient alone, we could really thrown out all the old software that we have been using and cost us a lot of money to upgrade yearly.

My friend encouraged me to convince my management to upgrade to the new technology of iSalient because this program guides users through the process of getting a survey off the ground from its free question templates and styles that we could customize with our own questions, to distributing the survey forms to reach a larger database of people, to interpreting the results from the feedback and generating quantitative analysis and rendering detailed reports in a professional style.

I am impressed to say the least! I hope that by the next round of survey, our company would have upgraded the whole survey system. If they haven’t, to be frank, I don’t want to get involved anymore!

I actually just got to know of a web design contest last night offered by a Dallas SEO services, lifeBLUE. Now, don’t get me wrong because this is not a contest where you submit your design to win but to win this, you submit your existing website, tell the world how ugly it is, solicit as many votes as you can and by the end of the contest period on 8th August, 2007.

The website with the most votes, effectively snagging the title the worst website design ever, will win a professional web design from the web designers from lifeBLUE. This is an amazing opportunity for people to get free publicity for their website, free linkbacks PLUS a shot at winning a free web design package.

If you don’t win though, you better engage someone to help with a new design because I am sure you don’t want to be known as the owner with the 2nd worst web design, do you?

Check out the contenders at http://www.lifeblue.com/web_design_contest/

If you want a brand new site, meaning you do not have any right now, you can still participate by submitting a Blogger or WordPress.com blog and then promote the contest on your own blog, forum, email and anywhere that you can think of. You will still be eligible to win.

To get you started, when you submit your site and then link to lifeBLUE with the anchor text “Dallas web design” or “web designers”, you will automatically be allocated TEN free votes! How cool is that?

Quickly get your ugly site submitted so that you have more time to plug its ugliness!

I am not sure if there is anyone who uses the internet as much as I do but this is where I work, get entertained and connect with people.

A few days ago, I was looking for videos of Bon Jovi’s performance on Live Earth Concert on 07.07.07. I had all the video sites opened from my bookmarks and then I was opening new windows from the search results so much so that my computer froze.

I thought there must be a better way to search the internet from just one starting point. I asked around and finally found out about Analyzr.com. After trying out this site, I could absolutely delete all the search engines from my bookmark because this is the only site I need to come to for my all searches.

If you have not heard of Analyzr.com yet, you should try it out. Type in your search term or keyword, select the category that you would like to search and then hit the search engine. Results are always rendered in a new window so you can always go back to Analyzr.com and get search results from other search engines. All the major sites are listed there so you don’t have to open multiple windows for all the search engines.

If you would like to have the search engine open in the same window, you could do so by clicking on the small window icon. I find the site very nifty and loads amazingly fast because of its streamlined layout.

After using it for a few searches, I wonder why no one ever thought of this before???

All is not wasted from my blog hopping activity. One blog led me to another and that was how I discovered Bloggrrl. Michelle who writes Bloggrrl is an ultra funny lady. I find myself looking forward to her post every day and I believe I am not the only one.

Image courtesy of Bloggrrl

This July, Bloggrrl is running a contest. It is so easy that everyone just has to participate so as not to lose out. To join, just write up a post linking to Bloggrrl’s Cow Patty Bingo contest and the mention your favorite post on the blog. My current favorite is 11 Mistakes Your Blog Makes In Bed.

If you do participate in this contest, do drop me a comment letting me know your favorite post on Bloggrrl.

The prize for this Cow Patty Bingo contest to the lucky winner is $50. Well, winning is a bonus. I am just happy enough to have found the funniest blog ever!