Living in Ipoh, I sometimes feel like I am losing out on a lot of things, especially in arts and culture. I mean, I hardly get exposed on art although I love art and the best I could do is to attend an art exhibition once in a blue moon. My friend, Paul, tells me that I should attend an art auction one day as it is very interesting and exciting to see people bidding against each other for “just” a piece of fine art that could amazingly run into millions of dollars.

Park West Art Gallery is an art gallery based in Michigan USA and that is too far away from me so the best is to view their catalog of art collections through their website.

Did you know that they have an sister company named Park West at Sea that sails around the world to conduct art auctions on their cruise ship. Talking about bringing art to the people!

I have always thought that wine drinking is a hobby reserved for the rich. I think I got this idea from watching too much soap opera like Falcon Crest. Last weekend, I had the opportunity to visit my friend’s new house. If you read my other blog, you would know that a friend of mine had a bar installed at home. Well, this was the friend who invited me and a few other friends home to show off his new bar.

I have no experience in drinking wine at all. In fact, I am a teetotaler and the only difference I can tell between red wine and white wine is the color. My friend, however, is more experienced in wine tasting. He says it’s his new hobby and has been reading up on fine wine and it is his dream to taste all the different wines in the world.

I saw that he has stocked his bar with Merlot and Chardonnay but I didn’t want to seem ignorant and ask him to tell me the history of these fine wine brand names. I think I better do a check on the web so that at least I will be able to follow their wine conversation the next time we converge at his home.

Some of you know that I run a webstore. Last month a new consignment came in and I had such a hard time taking good shots of my products because I was using my friend’s digital camera. Well, I was not used to its weight and all photos were all ruined.

I discussed with another friend on how to take better pictures because these were taking too much of my time. She suggested the use to tripods. Ah, why didn’t I think of that? I should have done a little search on the web.

Anyway, luckily I have a couple of mini tripods at home that were packaged with the digital camera that I bought last time. Even though they were only mini tripods, I still managed to get the photos shot pretty well for web publishing in time for Christmas sales.

If you are taking lots of product shots, it is definitely a good idea to set up a tripod. it worked for me.

A couple of months ago, my aunt bought a full featured washing machine. This appliance was picked by her son because my aunt says he “knows everything”. That’s why he picked one with complete features, which is a combination of a washer and dryer. It wasn’t cheap but they loved it.

Now that Chinese New Year is just round the corner and many a party has been planned, my cousin suggested that they buy a dishwasher to deal with all the plates, dishes, bowls and cups that they will have to wash. Haven’t they heard of paper plates that are specially made for parties? Apparently, these do not have “class”.

Anyway, my cousin did a little research on the web and said that they should get a Kitchen Aid dishwasher. I don’t know why he chose this but I have not heard of Kitchen Aid dishwashers before. OK, I admit, I have not heard of ANY brand name dishwasher before because I don’t own a dishwasher and have not purposely checked out the dishwasher market so I don’t even know what’s popular, let alone available.

Since my aunt says that my cousin knows best, a Kitchen Aid dishwasher is what they will be getting. You see, my cousin spends so much time surfing the internet, I wonder if there is anything that he does not know.

Running my own small business, I have made promotional products like business cards, postcards, calendars, t-shirts, pens and even business card magnets. Did you know that I have two hundred pieces of business card magnets that I did not give out to any of my customers? It is unfortunate that when I received them, they have already lost their magnetic power BUT I know this is a great promotional concept so it is important to order your business card magnets from a reputable printer.

If you think that giving out business cards your customers will remember you better, then giving out business card magnets will double the effect. While most people will misplace business cards or even if they have a business card organizer, it will only get lost in a stack of business cards, most people, when they receive a business card magnet, will stick it on their refrigerator door or metal cabinet. I know I will!

It is important to include your company logo, company name and all contact details, especially web address on your business card magnet so that you can be reached easily. Customizing it to suit your company’s theme and match your existing business card and stationery is a breeze if you use one of the ready made templates on BizCard.com or you can upload your own design to their editor and customize from there.

BizCard.com is currently offering 22 magnet business cards for free so why not grab this opportunity to try out their product quality and test the power of marketing with business card magnets?

I am sure you have read that I am having issues with my hosting. It seems that the server will suffer from an outage almost every day sometime from 2pm – 3pm Malaysian time. Sometimes it is just a short outage but sometimes it could go down for a couple of hours.

I believe I wrote a post recently on how all these outages on an almost daily basis is not doing my traffic any good. Well, I know that if all is fine, my traffic would be higher than my current numbers but then I am not complaining about my numbers right now because I know that I have not been networking and so it suffers from the lack here too.

Right now, I have been having issues with my Streamyx and this week has been awful in terms of a smooth broadband internet connection. I believe this is the worst I have ever seen since subscribing to this broadband internet package almost ten years ago.

And you know what? Between the sporadic connection of my Celcom 3G and the whims of my server, this week has been very challenging. I got so stressed out but yet I am trying my best not to be stressed and take things a little lighter.

Now, when my server is cranky, I just try to get away from the computer or get some sleep and hope that by the time I wake up, my blogs will be functioning again.

My friends in America are all ready for Super Bowl Sunday. My sister, who has lived in the United States for six years now have also caught the Super Bowl bug. Of course, I can never understand WHY Super Bowl is more popular than other sports but then I am not an American and I do not live there. It’s like a culture to them, a huge once a year party and those who cannot make it to the live game MUST plonk themselves in front of the idiot box.

My sister will be having friends over to her house. She told me that it would be a good opportunity to show off her new house. My sister said that she would have to look for party ideas so I told her about the website that has mayonnaise recipes on video but she told me that those are not good enough.

She was adamant to search for recipes for Super Bowl so I told her about Celebrations.com which has lots of big game party ideas, articles and recipes on videos as well. They do have just the kind of Super Bowl recipes that my sister was talking about.

On Celebrations.com, you will find recipes for salad, chicken wings and pizza burgers. Wow they sure are delicious. I am going to let my friend know about this so that he no longer has to make do with popcorn!