If you have been following my blogs long enough, you would have heard me time and again lament my lack of creative juice. I don’t even know why because some members of my family are very creative; good enough to make a living from it.

Today, I stumbled upon this social network called gre.at that is especially built for designers. This is a place where designers could showcase their work, network, share and participate in community contests to win prizes and even cash. A member recently won $100 in the 6th design award!

From what I understand, there will soon be a marketplace where designers could sell their services to buyers. Frankly, as someone who has no creativity at all, I am looking forward to this the most. You can be sure I am looking to commission work to designers of scrapbooking elements, WordPress themes and website templates for my online store and personal website. Yes, I know, I could easily find these for free on the web but they are never what I want.

The thing I like most about Gre.at is that even though there are many designs submitted, it is really easy to follow the progress of the website as a whole in the activity page or follow the work of my favorite designers.

If you like, you could also browse through designs randomly by viewing those with the highest votes, those that have been viewed the most or even those that are most discussed. This is very helpful in website navigation since there are so many new designs submitted at all times.

If you are a designer, I suggest you create an account with Gre.at now because surely they have more great things to come!

One of my computers has gone down again. Actually, it has been rather cranky for the past few months. Almost every time I turn it on, I have to do so twice because it showed the Blue Screen. I shut it off and could then successfully turn it back on again.

After months of such irritation, I couldn’t turn it on at all this morning so I decided to send it to the repair shop. I go to this shop regularly not because they have exceptional service, and in fact, some months back, they completely wiped out my data after failing to back up my files before running a format. You can be sure that I was pissed off and I made no secret about that.

The pure reason that I continue going to them is that they are open until 9pm and they are open for business even on Sundays. The others close so early that I haven’t even gotten off work yet.

Anyway, you know such shops, their staff turnover is very high. I see new faces all the time. So this morning, there’s this new girl there who attended to me. Although there were old staff too, they didn’t attend to me because they always make the newbies work, in a way, that’s how they learn on the job.

But this girl, she doesn’t know English too well, and wrote Blue Screen as Blue SKRIN. Desktop was spelt DEKSTOP among other misspellings. As a customer, how am I supposed to have confidence in their work? I hope that the technician, when he sees that work order, knows what I want specifically and will give me a call FIRST before working on it!

Gmail has added a new feature to Gmail Labs where Gmail users are now able to view multiple “inboxes” in the same page. Their definition of inboxes here means different labels and pages that you could find on the sidebar of your Gmail main inbox.

From what I tested just now, I would rather open these various labels and inboxes, if they were that important, in different tabs on my browser. Opening multiple “inboxes” in the same screen would be too crowded unless one has at least a 24in screen.

The good thing, though, is that we have total control over how these multiple inboxes are displayed, in what order and the number of messages to display. Still I don’t use Gmail that much to consider this an important additional feature to use on a permanent basis.

One thing I miss about Gmail after their recent updates with their labels and buttons is the Web Search. I used to use this search feature often enough right from my Gmail, but now the web search button seems to have gone and the only search available is mail search. I hope the developers of Gmail will bring this back.

Gmail has issued a last call for people who have yet to request for free Gmail stickers; that is, if they are interested in these free stickers. According to Gmail, postmark has to be no later than 14th February, 2009. Valentine’s Day, woot!

If you are interested, send a self-addressed stamped envelope to:

Send me some Gmail stickers already!
P.O. Box 391420
Mountain View, CA 94039-1420
United States of America.

Although Gmail mentions about sending out stickers to Gmail users worldwide, there’s no information on what kind of stamps or payment for postage that they accept. I have not read about how Malaysians are requesting for their free Gmail stickers or how much they are sending for postage.

I am not requesting any free Gmail stickers because my concern as a Gmail user has not been addressed. If you have read an old post of mine, I received an email to my Gmail box that was intended for another Gmail user with the same name. My email address and hers are similar, except that hers has a “dot” while mine does not.

Of course, I am not able to tell if this bug has been rectified, but it would be great to have my email replied to, reassuring me and other Gmail users that this would not happen again and that it was just a one-off incident. Well, perhaps they can’t even promise this.

MySpace has booted off 90,000 users from the social network whom they suspect are sex offenders. This is the second time since 2007 where they banned 29,000 accounts. This is in line with stricter measures to keep sexual perverts from the social site to create a more conducive environment for its users.

I don’t know what it is with MySpace but it seems to be so, so popular with under aged girls. They don’t even know how to differentiate between good and bad, friend or enemy, that’s why sexual perverts like to register with MySpace with and target these young girls.

The problem is that while MySpace says that they will be restricting contact between members who are under 18 and above 18, I feel that this wouldn’t be effective since sexual offenders will register with fake profile, name, address and age.

Facebook so far hasn’t done anything similar but they say they do keep tabs of user accounts. However, I think that no matter how hard they work at keeping their social networks safe, no matter what technology they adopt, it is up to us to protect ourselves.

Although it looks like the internet is highly popular and it’s not surprising to know that even young people have their own web space, there are still many people, and particularly, companies, without a web presence.

I have a couple of friends who would like to build a website but they are unwilling to pay too much for it becasuse basically they are not web savvy and don’t know the power of the internet.

I told them that under such circumstances, it would be better to build a website on a free host. They should sign up for Free Web and Application Hosting at ByteBooth.com where they would be provided with a free custom domain name, 2 Gigabytes of disk space, 150 Gigabytes of monthly data bandwidth and immediate FTP access where they could upload their files and go live.

I like the fact that ByteBooth has a very simple interface that even beginners could get started easily. On the other hand, more experienced users could make use of their standard FTP interface. Best of all, all these are provided free, and free for life to boot.

Sign up with ByteBooth.com now if you have always wanted you own web space. You can have it now, and free too.

If you are reading this, then you surely are a web user. I believe you would have noticed advertisement all over the internet, not just on websites but also blogs, forums, social networks and other online spaces. Normally, i am fine with these ad units but there are some that irritates me and distract me, especially pop up windows and bubble ads.

Just now, I was informed that Ad Muncher is able to block almost all kinds of advertisements no matter which popular browser we are using but that’s not all. I love the fact that even advertisements on messengers and other programs are blocked. This means that we no longer have to pay to enjoy an ad-free program. I would like to Try Ad Muncher now.

With almost zero advertisements to load on each web page that we visit, we are actually using less bandwidth and at the same time, shorten load times of webpages. No longer do we have to bear with increasing online advertisements, although I do understand that web masters and program creators need them to keep their services free.